After an 'inspiring' visit to Tarnthip waterfall on the southern side of Khao Yai national park, I came up with the following idea. I will explain it below as an example, but of course any additional ideas would be more than welcome!
First some images of what inspired me.
The idea:
How about organizing a national-park-cleaning-day every 3 months(?) with as many wildlifethailand-forum members as possible. Pick a national park, bring a lot of garbage bags and garbage picking tools and simply start cleaning up around busy spots, and on trails and park roads. Good for the parks, and also good for all of us to make new like-minded friends.
In my opinion, a day in a weekend would be best for two reasons: 1) volunteer availability, expecting many of us have a job on weekdays, and 2) because on weekends the parks are most busy with locals visiting, and I think it is good that people actually see us doing this. It will make people think, and hopefully some people will even get excited and join us (maybe I am dreaming here, haha, but anyway...).
It would mean a minor investment to buy rubbish picking tools and garbage bags, but I am sure that's not a major financial burden. It means we need some pick-up trucks to transport the garbage out of the park, and to carry all participants around (at least if people are willing to join.).
I know the community on this forum is not huge, but even with just a few people I expect it is possible to clean up a lot of rubbish. More people means we can cover more ground.
If we could get some attention by the media, maybe the group size will increase in the future. But in a way I like the idea of it being primarily 'farang', at least for the first cleaning-day(s). Let it be a statement that the foreign community living in Thailand cares about nature.
Maybe I should just mention a date. After new year seems a good time in my opinion. By then all the hordes of visitors have done their contribution to the rubbish pile. The weekend of 09 - 10 January 2016 would maybe be a good start.
And I guess to get most 'visibility' let's pick the most popular park, Khao Yai national park.
Please leave a comment to show if you are interested to join or not, or if you have any other ideas.