FOLAR Clean Up

Hello my name is Liliana Delgado and I'm in Professor Ximena Hernandez English 101 class. On May 3, 2014 I volunteered at the Los Angeles River to help clean up. My time there was a new, fun and memorable experience. At first I wasn't too excited to go because the weather was warm and I thought it was going to be boring. I was wrong. When I got there, people were already cleaning. I saw the truck filled with trash bags. I was extremely surprised of how much trash ends up in our river. What surprised me the most was that it didn't even look like a river. It looked like a space with trees, rocks, sand and trash. I put on gloves, my FOLAR shirt and sun screen and began to pick up trash. My boyfriend and I filled up two trash bags. I picked up plastic wrappers, glass bottles, cardboard, wood, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, and plastic paper bags. I've realized that all the trash we had picked up wasn't organic. It would take thousands of years for the trash that we had picked up to decompose. My brother, who works for North East Trees, had informed me that they had found a dead cat and a dead bird. People were finding all sort of trash like a baby crib, shopping cart, long pieces of wood and metal sticks. It makes me feel really good to know that I helped my environment. It may not seem as much, but the little effort that each and every single of us do, comes a long way. Watching the documentary of Jared Diamond about civilizations collapsing makes me afraid of what might happen to our civilization. By helping the environment on Saturday, makes me feel less afraid because I'm taking actions. The novel No impact man, the main character is trying not to harm the planet, and although no one else is doing what he is, he still is doing it because he feels like no one else is caring about the wastes we create every day. He is being the change that he wants to see.  Although we don't have control of other's actions, we have control of our actions and what we can do to help our environment. At the end of the day I preferred to have gone to the L.A river than to have stayed home sleeping. I would definitely go back next year and start going to events that help the environment.