volunteers

Martha and fellow Druids

The following was written by Martha M. Ertman:

“DC is a company town. If you don’t like the company of the Mump Administration, you can still do micro, focused good to keep the embers of democracy or basic respect for the environment alive until the political and cultural winds enable macro changes. A small group of NW women who call ourselves Druids have done just that to fend off the sense that we’re hopeless or helpless to combat climate change.

Being at or near retirement, with kids largely out of the house, we have bandwidth to meet monthly to do what we can. The spark was a 2022 New York Times article on Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a real Druid and genius octogenarian botanist and medical biochemist who for decades has climate-change adapted native trees on her 160 acres in Ontario, Canada. I read a couple of her nine books, and embraced her “bioplan” that every person on earth should plant 6 trees to buy us time to solve the climate crisis.

Neighbors joined: a journalist, educators, a few attorneys, and most importantly, a landscaper. We watched Dr. Diana’s documentary Call of the Forest – made by the people who brought us March of the Penguins — and discovered that Casey Trees was already harnessing volunteer labor and enthusiasm to planting native trees – 6000+ a year – in Washington DC.

We still meet monthly to do be a bit of the change we want to see in the world. Arbor Day dinner complete with gorgeous tree-stump shaped chocolate cake, touring the Arboretum at American University, or donning elbow-length suede gloves to remove invasive weeds from Rock Creek Park. (more…)