L.A. River cleanup~

Hello, my name is Yilin Ruan and this is my first year in CSULA. I am taking English 101 right now, and in this class, we are learning a lot of things about protecting the environment. On April 23, I went to the Service Learning Fieldtrip with all my classmates, and all of us were there to help the cleanup of L.A. River.

I woke up at 7:00 a.m. and then I went straight to the L.A. River.  After a long line for sign in, I got the trash bags, gloves and then I started picking up trash. It was fun at the beginning; I picked up a lot of chips bags, spoons, and plastic cups. I cannot believe that there was so much trash in the L.A. River, everyone there had a big bag of trash and some of them had two and more. I also found and picked up a lot of breaking glasses and iron sticks from the river side.  It is hard to realize the pollution of river if I did not come and see what we have done to the environment. In my English class, I learned that all those trash would harm the environment and animal. For example, in the book The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, the pollution of air and water were making all the animals included birds and fishes left their families. In fact, most of the fishes and birds will be died because they ate those trashes such as plastic, glasses or the food with chemical. Now I think i have a better understanding of how bad the pollution is and I feel so good that I actually helped with the cleanup.