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News Release
Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
3003 N. Charles Street, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-3843
Phone: (410) 516-7160 / Fax (410) 516-5251
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April 30, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:
Gary Dorsey,
gdd@jhu.edu
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Lab Assistant Tackles Preakness Trash,
Saves Acres of Rainforest
It is the day after the
Preakness
Stakes and yet
another orgiastic festival of 90,000 has left the huge infield of
Pimlico Race Course in
Baltimore steeped in the detritus of Budweiser and buckets of
KFC, tip sheets and
newspapers. The temperature climbs into the 90s, and the smell of
stale beer rises like
steam from a crab boil.
Enter Johns Hopkins lab technician Tim Hoen and his PhD
trash-pickers.
By mid-day on Sunday, May 16,, they will have earned enough money
cleaning the infield
to buy another large tract of the Costa Rican rainforest.
Through a national "Adopt-An-Acre" program, supported in part by
the Nature
Conservancy, the trash-pickers' cash will purchase and protect
habitat for endangered
animals, plants and ecosystems in the tropics.
"We call it 'trash for cash,'" said Hoen, who assists in the
Biophysics Department and serves as
president of an
organization that sponsors the annual
Preakness
Cleanup. "In one
day, our volunteers can raise as much as $4,000, which will buy
another 80 acres of
rainforest. For a half day's work, we can do something really
positive."
This is the second year Hoen and friends have organized the
cleanup and the ninth that
they have participated. With a crew of a hundred pickers, working
from 6 a.m. to noon,
they will have bagged enough chicken bones and crumpled paper and
cashed in enough
aluminum cans to buy a nesting beach for a few leatherback sea
turtles or a small reserve
for red-eyed tree frogs.
"We usually have people from Hopkins and another contingent from
the National
Aquarium, but we'll take anyone who's willing to break a sweat
and pick garbage," says
Hoen, who manages to corral a dozen of Johns Hopkins research
scientists, post-docs
and graduate students from the labs for a hard half-day steeped
in what can be a most
revolting accumulation of garbage. "In the past, we've even had a
group of people on
probation who do this to knock out a few hours of mandatory
community service."
Since 1993, Hoen has raised money to purchase more than 2,500
acres of rainforest
through the cleanup and his other non-profit fund raiser, the
Mid-Atlantic
Reptile
Show.
An avid environmentalist, his love for animals carries over from
the Hopkins lab where
he works to the reptiles he cares for at home to the rich variety
of animals that inhabit
the rainforests.
His inspiration, though, comes from San Francisco, where a
zookeeper named Norm
Gershenz turned that city's discarded parking meters into an
ecological gold mine that
has raised
more than $1 million for rainforest protection. Relying on the
generosity of passing
tourists who
pop quarters into Gershenz's "conservation meters" at zoos and
museums around the
country, the San Francisco environmentalist has teamed with The
Nature Conservancy to
purchase land that will protect endangered tropical habitats
from Costa Rica to
Indonesia.
"The first time I talked to Norm, I knew we were soul mates,"
Hoen says. "He saw an
opportunity to do something big with a little idea -- save
millions of acres of rainforest,
wetlands and coral reefs with parking meters. I thought, 'Why
can't I do something like
that?'"
Volunteers at this year's Preakness Cleanup will get T-shirts, a
picnic lunch, and prizes
donated by local businesses, including a two-night stay at a
downtown Baltimore hotel,
movie passes, and tickets to the Mid-Atlantic Reptile Show in
September.
Anyone interested in helping Hoen's cleaning crew or learning
more about the rainforest
project should contact Holli Friedland at (410) 602-0828.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
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of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
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