TLC In the Crescent City

Thousands of Americans gathered on September 29 to show their support for our public lands by participating in hundreds of National Public Lands Day activities around the country. One of the most ambitious took place at a Sierra Club-organized "Public Lands In Public Hands" event in New Orleans, where Club volunteers and staff worked with local residents to collect garbage, weed, mow, rake, hack down overgrown grasses, and otherwise clean up Bayou Bienvenue in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, notoriously one of the areas hardest-hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, with which the Sierra Club has been partnering on a variety of cleanup and rebuilding projects in New Orleans, chose the worksite, which is to become a future public park and currently provides access to the bayou for local anglers.

Read more about the Sierra Club's Gulf Coast Environmental Restoration work.

Photos by Elizabeth Glass.