Beach Clean Ups – DO Sweat the Small Stuff
This past Saturday, the family participated in a beach clean up:
Prudential California Realty was sponsoring events up and down the California coast and we attended the one at Doheny Beach. It was exciting for the kids to learn about keeping our ocean and our water clean, despite that feeling of despair that can creep in when you realize how much there is to clean up, kind of like the feeling of looking at your dirty house two hours before guests are coming over and thinking I am never going to get this all clean (only instead of just your kitchen, it’s the whole ocean).
The Surfrider Foundation addressed the group and stressed the importance of picking through the seaweed for all the little bits of garbage that get stuck in the seaweed. When the tide comes in and takes the seaweed back into the water, these little bits dislodge and fish mistake it for food.
For example, take this pile of seaweed right here:
This is one handful of what I found in it:
A used Band-Aid, fishing wire, and Styrofoam (you can see more fishing wire tangled up on the ground).
My family spent our clean up time going through these piles of seaweed. It was a way of teaching the kids that everything matters, that something as unnoticeable as a speck of Styrofoam was still worth picking up and disposing of properly. The Boy’s catchphrase of the clean-up was “Can the fish choke on this?” and if the answer was yes, we put it in the bag.
When we returned to the starting point and added our bag of garbage to the pile in the dumpster, people were comparing the crazy pieces of garbage they found:
A suitcase
Fencing? Lobster cage?
We had nothing large to show, only a bag of bits and pieces, of the ignored bits of pollution that float in and out of our ocean every day because “such a little thing surely couldn’t matter.” But put a couple hundred little things together, like there were in my garbage bag, and you’ll see how quickly little pollution adds up to big pollution.
Keep this clean, won’t you?
Anyone interested in ocean conservation should check out the Surfrider Foundation.
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Thank you for doing that!
At Coastal Clean-up a few weeks back, the fifth grade classes cleaned up the creek near their school. (Yeah, even though it’s miles from the “real” coast, the creekbed counts.) I wish more kids would clean up to grasp the concept of how one person can make a difference — good or bad.