Not all of us have the good fortune to live close to the ocean, but if you do...if you grew up near one like I did... then you know that special feeling the ocean gives you. It's a feeling that's hard to explain, but it is uplifting, healing and inspirational all at once.
When I read about the Plastic Soup, it broke my heart to think that we have destroyed something so beautiful all for the sake of convenience!
I run at the beach 3 times a week and see a lot of plastic waste and trash below the high tide mark, which means that junk will be in the water within a few hours time.
Whenever I see trash I try to pick it up, in fact I'm kind of obsessive about it, but I see so many people that just step right over it and go merrily on their way. If you want to enjoy the beauty of something, wouldn't you want to help take care of it too? It just takes a few minutes to pick up a piece of trash and deposit it in a trash can.
Our city has an organization called ILACSD (I love a clean San Diego) that puts on several beach clean ups per year and I highly recommend getting involved with something like that. A lot of the plastic that ends up in the ocean could have been kept out if it had just been picked up off the beach.
It's great to have occasional beach clean ups, but what happens to all the trash that ends up on the beach the other 363 days of the year? Wouldn't it be great if we could have daily beach clean ups?
Well I just looked on the ILACSD website and they have an adopt-a-beach program which is exactly what I was thinking of! Check it out at: http://www.ilacsd.org/v_beach.php There are currently over 5000 volunteers.
I think when I retire I am going to volunteer at ILACSD or something like it. It is so gratifying to know that you are doing something to help our planet.
I recommend it to everyone. We should all be doing something, no matter how insignificant. If I pick up 10 pieces of trash a day (which I do plus some) 3 days a week, 50 weeks a year, that's 1500 pieces of trash. Muliply that by even just 5000 people and you're talking 7,500,000 piece of trash we would keep from washing into the ocean every year!
