Hello, my name is Erika Hernandez and I am currently a freshman at CSULA taking this English 101 class. This is actually a class that I really enjoy and I just had a great memorable experience as well. This past weekend we actually came along with the Heal the Bay project which I found was a great experience and also made me feel better about actually making a change in our world for better. Environmental issues such as pollution is something that is affecting not only the world we live in today but will also affect us in the future if we don’t put a stop to it and take care of our environment. Now, the project we did consisted of my class and I to go to Dockweiler Beach and clean/pick up trash and other objects that may harm our environment if they were to go into the ocean. Littering is something that is really harming our environment and the reason for this is because all the trash being thrown on the floor or anywhere that goes into the drains eventually end up in our ocean where we have all type of animals that will one day all extinct if we don’t protect them from all this. At the beach we found many harmful objects. Objects such as plastic, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and cans was what we mostly found around the beach. What was most surprisingly to me that the huge number of cigarette butts and plastic found all along the beach. These two things are some of the most dangerous for our sea animals yet it’s sadly what we mostly found. According to some of our other class mates, they also agreed with us that the objects they mostly came along with were plastic and cigarette butts but there were also some that came along with other things around the beach such as shopping carts, diapers, condoms, bottle caps and many other. I have to admit, it was kind of hard to pick up every little piece of paper and trash we found due to the big amount of it but one of the things we did do was to clean as best as we could and leave the beach as clean as we possibly could hoping to actually create change and to make other people understand that pollution is wrong. In my point of view, I can say it was a great experience cleaning up the beach and it’s something I will definitely do again. Gathering up information/ data to help with statistics also made me feel better since its something productive that is being done.