(Here is the opening of Thomas McClelland's hymn to Bag Snagging.)
Click title to hear:
Collect Pond
(excerpt)
There is plastic in the air and it catches in the hair
Of the trees that all around us grow.
And in sycamore and elm in the breezy upper realms
You will see it waving to and fro.
There has seldom been a blight that has suffered less a fight
Than the bags that no one seems to see.
Although cause for some to frown, there are none to take them down
So the answer must reside in you and me.
Let the bags be borne out of the trees;
Let the green leaves remain.
With no harm done by us and with little or no fuss
Let the bags be borne away. . .
Composerís Note:
The hymn Collect Pond celebrates the joys of taking plastic bags out of
trees. "Bag Snagging" is an activity my
brother, Tim, our friend, Ian Frazier, and I have been doing together since the early
1990s. Tim is a metalsmith
and jeweler who designed the bag snagging tool, a steel grapnel attached to the end
of a 12-foot telescoping
pole (which can be attached to additional poles) and extended up into a tree to remove
plastic bags or other items
which have gotten stuck. He also wrote the text for the hymn. Bags in trees are a
particular problem in New York
City where we have done most of our snagging, and the title Collect Pond refers
to the pocket park of that name in
downtown Manhattan whose trees always seem to get more than their fair share of bags.
We have made a
special effort to keep Collect Pond Park bag-free since we began snagging. For more
information about "Bag
Snagging" and the tool we use, you may visit our web page.
About the actual "Collect Pond"
in Manhattan:
The location of the original "Collect
Pond":
