Healing the Bay @ Dockweiler Beach

Hello! My name is Brandon Lee and I'm currently attending CSULA and I along with my fellow classmates participated in cleaning up the beach. At first, I was excited to help clean the beach, but then I realized it was much more than cleaning the beach. Healing the bay is a way to understand nature and see the impact we as humans do to our environment and it is sad. Seeing all the trash laying around, and countless dangerous objects that can be harmful to people and animals everywhere. This just shows how careless we are as humans and what we are doing to the environment. Yet, I am very happy that I had the opportunity to give back to the environment and take part in something that changed our planet. Hopefully by my actions cleaning the beach, people will understand how important it is to keep our beaches clean and save our world from littering and carelessness.

Cleaning Dockweiler Beach

Hello my name is Kevin Sakamoto. My classmates, from English 101 at CSULA, and I participated in a beach cleaning event called Heal the Bay at Dockweiler Beach. I had never done anything like this before so I was interested to see what it would be like. When my classmates and I were told that this was one of the cleanest beaches I was hopeful that I wouldn’t have to pick up very much trash, but when we got there I realized that even one of the cleanest beaches is pretty dirty. It made me wonder what the dirtiest beaches looked like. My classmates and I helped clean the beach from 9-12 Sunday morning and managed to fill several bags full of trash. While cleaning the beach I realized the number one thing we found was cigarette butts. It was unbelievable how many we found. We also found a lot of plastic and Styrofoam pieces. The worst thing is that all these little pieces of trash are mistaken as food by the wild life and are hazardous to their health. We even found a knife and a car sunroof. There were many other weird thing found that should not be on a beach. All this made me realize how filthy people can be by not throwing away their trash. Next time I got to the beach I will be sure to throw all my trash away to help prevent harm to the environment. Cleaning the beach was a fun experience and opened my eyes to how little things can help out the environment.

Healing the Bay

Hello, my name is Enrique Gomez. I am a student in a English 101 class at Cal State L.A. This past Sunday my class participated in an event, "Heal the Bay", where we went to Dockweiler Beach to clean it. My group decided to only clean the streets behind the beach area. I was shocked at all of the trash we found lying around the area. I'd imagine the actual beach has a lot more trash. We found a lot of the same trash over and over again, such as plastic bottles, plastic/beer bottle caps, and cigarettes. As if that wasn't enough, we also found a knife at the top of a hill. Why are all of these objects just lying around? People could get seriously hurt, especially from the knife we found. The beach is suppose to be a place where people can simply relax without having to worry about getting hurt. However, these dangerous objects are making it difficult to do so. I didn't realize how horrible the trash at beaches were before. I am glad that my English 101 class decided to attend the "Heal the Bay" event over the past weekend. Not only did we clean the beach for our own safety, but also for the safety of all the animals that come across this garbage on the beach daily. I would hate to see what the other beaches' garbage is like.

A Day at the Beach

It is very interesting to find out what our beaches look like and really take the time to see what buried treasures we can find. At least for some beaches it can be done like Dockweiler Beach, where we were able to clean up the beach and create research for those who are trying find out what is killing our marine life. For the most part I feel happy that we, the Stretch Composition class, were able to take a Sunday off and use our energy for something effective and efficient for the ocean and it inhabitants. All of the trash that our class was able to pick up and throw away was remarkable. Not only the amount, but also the size of each object. For example, my team found about 10 glass bottles of beer, a Styrofoam cooler, and a few paper and plastic bags. And how not to forget the hundreds of cigarette butts we found lying around. People have to become aware of what they are doing so that this can be avoided. It is not fair that our marine life has to pay the price for our laziness. It doesn't take a lot of energy to take your trash to the trash can!

Helping The Environment

This past Sunday I was able to participate in a great event. As part of my English class I was able to go help out at the beach and see why they say the beaches are so dirty. While arriving there it was clear that i couldn't really see the beach I don't know if it was because the day was so foggy or because right next to the beach the air port is there and obviously the planes create smog in the air. Well besides that when arriving there we were given instructions to clean up the beach and pick up anything that looked to be out of place. Some of the things we didn't pick up were things that looked dangerous or something harmful. While walking around the beach with my classmates we discovered various things that didn't seem to fit into the beach environment. For example we found socks laying around like if it was a laundromat, we found tampons GROSS!!, we also found allot of cigarette buds. A beach is suppose to be a friendly environment where you want to take your family for a nice time not to see all these disgusting things. As part of the clean up we were given bags and a tally marker to check of how many things we found and the number of times we found them. I was along with all of my classmates and it made it feel like we were a group and not just one person doing all of the work. I was able to cooperate with all of the guys and see how they all work and also find out that we can all work together. It made me feel good that I was doing something to help out this planet and that even though it is not as big of a clean up as i wish it could have been it made me feel good to know that I was doing something to help out. While doing all of this it make me think about the comic i had read in our book called As The World Burns and it shows that if we do not do anything to save the world it will end up dying. We must also think about the animals that are living here and we must also learn that we are not the only ones living in this planet. It makes me feel great knowing that I am not the only one that thinks this and also that I was able to make a difference for one day.

- Stephanie Rodriguez , Instructor: Hasmik Barsamian

Bay Needing Healing

Hello. My name is Mike Landaverde and I participated in an event that allowed me and my peers to clean Dockweiler State Beach. They told us this beach was one of the cleanest beach in the Los Angeles area, but that day it appeared to be far from clean. This beach was covered with all kinds of trash, from ocean to where the street met, and this was hard to believe to be the cleanest. What we did at this event was get into groups and get even in the most uncomfortable places to be to pic up trash and all kinds of objects that where not suppose to be lying around that seemed like a potential threat to all kinds of life, both human and animal. Why we chose to do this matters a lot, because this shows that marine life is very important to us. Apart from that, we as humans enjoy the beach several times in a year, and many are exposed to dangers of getting hurt or sick, just like life in the ocean. Even if it was just one beach and it was for such a short time, we eventually were able to pick up multiple bags of trash and make somewhat of a difference that probably would have prevented health risks.

Heal The Bay

Cleaning the beach wasn't exactly my idea of a Sunday morning, but it was really fun. My English 101 class was invited to help clean Dockweiler Beach. My classmates and I found a diversity of trash, from cigarettes butts to styrofoam pieces, and plastic bags. Healing The Bay was a really interesting experience, I learned a lot from it. I would've never paid attention to all that trash if it wasn't because we actually went to clean the beach. At the end, there was a lot of trash collected, and I realized that our time and effort was worth because even though the beach wasn't perfectly clean, we picked up a lot of trash that could have ended up hurting plants and animals in the ocean. We really made a difference. Yes it's not that much trash when you actually start thinking about all the trash there is in every beach, but little by little it starts to be something and something is better than nothing.