Green Gulch Folks Help with Oil-Spill Clean-up at Muir Beach

It’s nice to see hard-working Buddhists making a difference! I was just there at both Green Gulch and Muir Beach the Sunday before the terrible oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Muir Beach is such a magnificent spot.

Green Gulch Residents Support Oil-Spill Clean-up
Written by Sangha-e Staff

On the afternoon of Friday, Nov 9th, approximately thirty people, twenty of whom were Green Gulch Farm Zen Center residents, participated in an oil-spill clean-up action on Muir Beach. The efforts of Green Gulch Farm residents were mentioned in an article that appeared in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Manfred Krautter, a Greenpeace Campaign coordinator writes in, "I really appreciate the work done by Green Gulch Farm staff and Practice Period students, I am sure it helped a lot to limit the impacts of the oil spill in the Muir Beach area."

http://news.sfzc.org/content/view/437/40/

This is from the Chronicle article (ridiculous):

Things were more tense Friday in Marin County, where Sigward Moser led a 30-person volunteer group - including 20 monks-in-training from the Mill Valley Zen Center - onto Muir Beach. For his efforts, he was detained and handcuffed.

The little army managed to scoop up nearly 500 bags of gloppy, sandy oil between 2 and 5 p.m. Moser said it was easy duty: "It rolls up like kitty litter, right off the surface of the sand. Went right into the bags with no problem."

They got almost all the oil they could find - and then a National Park Service ranger showed up.

"He asked us to leave, and we said we needed to do what we were doing, so he put me in handcuffs," said Moser, a communications consultant. "I told him, 'Well, there was nobody else doing the cleanup before we began.' But he just said I was breaking the law and this is hazardous material that I shouldn't be dealing with."

Moser was cited for two misdemeanors - failure to obey an official order and entry into a restricted area - and released.

Now he has 500 bags of glop in his yard, and he has no idea how to get rid of it.

Link