LA River Clean Up

Hello, I am Jaclyn Martinez
 I attended the LA River clean up as a part of my English class assignments.
This LA River clean up trip was a total adventure for me. It was the complete opposite to what I was expecting. One thing I was not expecting were all the plants and trees that were growing in the middle of the river, but what was disturbing was to see all the garbage that was stuck in the trees because they had apparently adapted and grown with the trash. That made the trash extremely difficult to pick up. The item that was most difficult to obtain were the plastic bags because many of them were stuck in threes, they intertwined in the branches, others were half buried in the ground and could not always be pulled out because it would tear leaving the rest of the bag stuck somewhere in the ground. Going into the river to clean up was not the most pleasant adventure because of all the plants, bugs, air particles and heat  however it was a mind bottling and learning experience. I admit that when LA decided to ban plastic bags at the supermarkets I was upset because it made grocery shopping less convenient but when I saw how many bags we had to pick up and how many were stuck and unsalvageable I then understood that maybe just buying canvas bags to replace plastic bags is not completely a bad idea. this experience was not all bad because it was interesting to see that deep in the la river can be lying the most bizare and unimaginable items. For example, my team and I found a complete Toy Story blanket what was amazing was that despite it being buried under a tree and tangled in the roots of the tree, the blanket was in tact; it was about 5 sq. feet. Along with the blanket we found half a car tire that was also buried under a tree, fortunately we were able to dig it out. Unlike the blanket and car tire, we found a cart that was unfortunately impossible to get out because of all the plants already growing in and around it, plus we did not find it safe because we did not know if any animals had already made it into their home. Although finding these cool items somewhere unexpected was productive my team and I were disappointed to not be able to find and opening into the river, no matter how much we walked down the river passed all the plants we could not find an opening into the river and after a while we gave up. At the end of the day my team and I felt accomplished and proud of what we had done. It was a new adventure for all of us and taught us numerous things. It was a good day.

Hello my name is Keyera Johnson and I attended the LA River clean up with professor Hernandez English 101. During the La river clean up my group and I found unbelievable items while walking around cleaning. We saw and found things like food wrappings, a lot of plastic, pieces of clothing and even a suit case, but we could not grab it out due to the fact it was deep in the ground and wrapped in between the tree. I could not believe how much trash it was polluted in that area, it amazed me because the things we found were every day items we use. Also I learned that majority of the trash was plastic bottles and food wrappings and I remember during my trash experiment I collected lot's of food wrappings as well. Before taking a trip to the La river I knew nothing about it and I had no clue what it even looked like, now that I have gotten the chance to see/ experience the clean up I strongly encourage others to come out and help clean it up. Just imagine how beautiful it would be and how we would be able to get our water from there instead of somewhere else. I actually got a chance to see the river and it looked very dirty and also had a smell to it I was surprised when I seen the ducks swimming in that type of water. Over all I learned that we polluted our resources and it harms our economy and makes the city looks dirty.

LA River clean up

My little sister

An old fan that I found

My name is Jocelyn Perez and I'm from Ximena Hernandez English 101 class. My point of view of the environment have always been different compared to others, I've always wondered what would life be like without our natural resources? This class has taught me to be aware of the amount of natural resources I'm using. I appreciate every ounce of it. So this past weekend on Saturday May 3, I helped out the community by attending a clean up event. Not only was I fortunate to go, but I also had the opportunity to join the team and clean the Los Angeles river. It feels amazing when you know you're putting your part in by helping the environment. When I arrived I saw a whole group of people and I couldn't believe the amount of people that were there. It surprised me because the amount of people I saw there were there to help out our environment, usually now in todays society nobody cares about the environment. So that's why it surprised me that there were people who took their time of the day to help out. My little sister tagged along with me, I wanted her to experience this with me because not many children are expose to this kind of things. When we started to clean, we were given two bags and a pair of gloves. As we went along the river, we came across a lot of trash bags and plastic bottles. The trash bags were hard to pick up from the trees, I was surprised how much of a good grip I had to have in order to get the bags. There was also paper and rubber bands. Beside the bags, we also collected food wrappings. It was disappointing at first because I thought it was going to smell fresh and it was the complete opposite. It smelled really bad, instead of smelling like fresh air, it smelled polluted and I felt awful because we are the reason the river looks like this. The trash that appeared to be there was because of us. This relates to our reading in class No Impact Man, how us humans impact the environment. No Impact Man explains the concept of plastic bags and how they end up in the ocean harming other sea-life. Also, the reading from Jenny Price "How to see L.A thirteen ways" relates to this experience, L.A is much more than a city of fame and riches, there's a lot more to L.A then what it seems to be. We are the reason for this, we should instead recycle our bags and water bottles, too. I would't mind doing this experience again. Overall, this experience has taught me and showed me what harm we are doing to our environment and how blind we are. I'm enjoying this class because it is teaching me more about nature and how we should view nature. We have a group of people who are joining together to make a difference in this community.

LA River Cleanup

Hello my name is Jenilee Iniguez and I am from Ms. Hernandez English 101-21. On May 3rd, I had an opportunity to help keep the La River clean. To be honest I thought the river was not going to have as many trash as people had told. I was surprised because my group and I found so much trash around the river.  When my professor told my class that there were plastic bags everywhere I did not believe it. Once we started to clean the very first trash I found was a plastic bag. I was so surprise on how many plastic bags my group and I found. We also found a lot of candy wrappers and chips bags. Something cool we found while looking for trash around the river was a place that looked like people were living there. We found clothes and something for a baby. After we wishing cleaning the river my group and I decided to go sort the trash. It was very hot and I did want to sort the rash. One thing I noticed about sorting trash is that there was a lot of plastic bags and little pieces of plastic. It was a great experience going to the L.A. River and I would not change it for anything in the world.

Hello My Fellow Classmates of English 101, as some of you already know and for those that do not know my name is Brittany Fernandez and I am student of Professor Hernandez. In this blog post I am here to tell you about my life changing as well as eye opening experience that happened while cleaning up the Los Angeles River. On May 3rd 2014 myself, my classmates, and other students within CSULA spent our early morning / afternoon cleaning up the Los Angeles River. To be completely honest I thought I would not get that much out of this experience but I was wrong and in fact I loved it and I'm glad that I had this amazing opportunity. As an individual I just usually stick to recycling and not really paying attention to all the other harming objects that have been embedded within our environment. To begin my day at the Los Angeles River we were put into groups and told to basically find and pick up as much trash as you can; in which we would later take it to the truck that was taking it away from the river. My group started out as three and somehow turned into seven but regardless I loved my group and rather than looking at this field trip as a job we saw it as an adventure to help make our L.A. River clean and even greener than before. Throughout the day our group found many food and drink containers and plastic wrappers but what we were most astonished by was finding an area within the greenery of the river which resembled a home or as if someone had been living there in that particular section of river. Within the section that looked like a home we found lot's of wood, cloth material, a snow or warm body suit, and strangely a piece of baby equipment that looked as if it belonged to a jumper or rocker; we later found a suitcase and a storage container. At first I did not think that I was going to have to walk down that steep incline of the hill to get to actual river and when I figured out that I would have to I was afraid that I was going to fall but thanks to my group members Angela and Jenielee they held my hand until we all got to the bottom. Through out looking for trash I would say that even though most of the greenery of the river was a challenge at times to get through that it overall is truly and incredibly an amazing place to be and even wander around for a bit. In order to see the river one needs to pass and get through all of greenery but in the end the struggle is definitely worth the view. Throughout this experience I had came to realize that it was not that other individuals were intentionally putting all this trash in the river but it is the fact that they leave their trash and other objects that with the rain and storms it washes into our L.A. River creating harm to that particular environment. Towards the end of our experience my whole group and I volunteered to help sort out the trash that we and others had collected throughout the day and by us doing so I realized just how many different plastics there are as well as half of the trash are whole or ripped plastic bags that sadly were embedded into the trees from having been there so long. During the trash sorting my group and I found two credit cards one being an American Express Card and other being an actual debit card....we wanted to see if one of the cards still had money on it but we decided not to! Overall I am glad that I attended this filed trip oh and in fact Yareli and myself carpooled on our way there and back so I guess you can say that we tripled our experience by helping create less smog and gases in the air! Another thing is now that my group and I have bonded through that experience one can say that we became even better friends..I wouldn't trade my group for any other, they were or should I say we were AMAZING!

Hello my name is Angela Ramos and I'm in Ms. Hernandez English 101 class. On Saturday, May 3 we had the opportunity to join with FoLar and other volunteers to help clean a part of the La river. When I first heard about it I was actually a bit thrilled because it was actually going to be my first time being there, but the night before I saw that it was going to be pretty warm. In the morning debating if to go or not and end up going. The experience was pretty cool. I was able to interact with my classmates while helping out the environment. We actually found a spot where it looked like someone had camped out. My group didn't only participate in the cleaning, but also in sorting out the trash. For every fifth bag counting we would open it up and sort it. What we found was that there were a lot of grocery bags more than anything. Overall the whole thing was a great experience and it felt good helping out the environment.

Hello my name is Jimmy Dinh and I am in Professor Hernandez's English 101 class. Like almost everybody in the class, I joined up with the professor on March 3, 2014 to the L.A. river. Truth be told, I was looking forward for a couple of sightseeing with my group. Instead, we were welcome with dust particles, trash, and a bunch of branches. I was hoping the river to be what I was imagining many rivers to be. Unfortunately, I never got to see the river out in the open. I only manage to spot a dirty stream of water. There were interesting things that my group manage to find along the way. For example, Andres found something metallic. We all assume it might have been a bucket or something close. It was also rusted too, which means it went through some rain. We also found a shopping cart, but it was stuck inside the tree. Other interesting things we came by was a very dirty Toy Story blanket. However, we found a bunch of plastic and broken glass. I still am disappointed that I never manage to get a better view of the river. Overall, I did enjoy the trip. It was not so bad since I had friends with me. I did not manage to get much picture because that did not come into my mind.