NOVA is a place we all know, and sometimes love, but few care about our environment here as much as senior Kime Howard.
As a suburb of a major metropolitan area, Springfield is hugely populated with over 30,000 people living in a less than eight square mile area. This makes for a great community, but it doesn’t make for a great natural environment. Trash litters our city, overflowing from creek beds, neighborhood streets, and local parks. Luckily, we have senior Kime Howard to help the cleanup cause.
“In the past year, I’ve spent 8-10 hours [picking up trash],” said Howard. “It’s never ending, there’s always trash. I went down [to the creek by my house] two times and I picked up 70-80 pounds of trash.”
Groups like NHS or projects like the Capstone may force students to go out and help their community in ways like collecting trash or food drives, but it’s less common to see a student make that effort on their own. Ever since Howard enrolled in AP Environmental Science her junior year, she has been dedicating herself to making a difference.
“Not only do you get the college credit, you get the message too” said Howard’s mom, Kathy Howard.
AP Environmental was just one part of getting Howard fired up to make change. She doesn’t attribute her actions to a role model or a documentary, but rather, her observations. Pollution is visible from almost every place outside in Fairfax County, and that is what caught Howard’s attention.
“I’m kind of disgusted in our community sometimes. You don’t always see it at first, but when you see it, you can’t stop [seeing it],” said Howard.
And garbage isn’t the only thing Howard is picking. When she and her mom drove by the school over the summer, they saw the garden at the front of the school littered with weeds.
“It look[ed] like it [had been] abandoned,” said Kathy Howard.
Not being the type to pass by without a second thought, Howard and her mom agreed amongst themselves to care for the garden.
Over the summer they came to WS for three hours every week and picked over 14 bags of weeds, planted flowers, and tended to the front garden of the school when nobody else was around to do it.
“We decided that is our garden and we are going to take care of it,” said Kathy Howard.
Not one to only go halfway, Howard is also a founding member of the Environment Club at WS which promotes activities like recycling, going on trash cleanups to local parks and educating WS students about their impact on the environment.
“I want [students] to join Environmental Club so we can educate ourselves and spread that education by word of mouth,” said Howard.
Howard fosters a better environment everywhere she goes by voluntarily picking up trash and beautifying community areas, but it’s impossible for one person to reverse the pollution caused by tens of thousands.
Howard wishes to make changes not only outdoors, but also in the minds of the people she can influence.
“Usually I’ll take pictures of all the trash I pick up and be like ‘This is where we live’ and all of these people are inspired for an hour and then they forget about it,” said Howard.
“If everyone picked up one piece of trash a day, what are there, 2,000 students at our school? That’s 2,000 less pieces of trash on the ground every day, and even if that doesn’t do anything other than make it look better, it still makes a nicer community.”