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.