LA River before starting
One difference with this event was that it was sponsored by Aquarius Springs! water. The beginning of the event started with a few people talking, a presentation of a plaque and $50,000. Local television and print media was on hand to capture the event.
People watching the presentation. I'd be lying if I wasn't super anxious and ready to go (as demonstrated by the fact I was busy taking pictures instead of paying attention...)
I don't know if it was due to recent clean-ups or lack of rain or just that everything was buried, but there wasn't a large deal of obvious trash visible.
At first it looks like maybe there is a single piece of trash there...
... but when you examine things up close, you notice the plastic stuck all over the place.
more trash.....
I'm sure I was neither the first nor the last person to try to pick this up that day. It's the only part of a much larger shopping cart stuck in the ground. I know areas of the LA River near my home don't have the high rate of shopping carts that this area does. A little further up the river, there's a huge pile of shopping carts stuck in the river tangled up and stuck together. Wandering in that area you can find and see shopping carts from stores you forgot even existed.
This guy was telling this woman he was just walking through the park this morning, noticed the clean-up happening and decided to participate. Awesomeness.
So many dried thistles. Back in May they were purple.
The lighting was bad, so this photo does not do justice to the intense and iridescent colors on this beetle. There were also a large number of small intensely blue colored dragonflies that I was too busy watching to take pictures of them.
The opening to a small clearing in a bamboo forest. I could have spent the rest of the day in there.
At one point my boyfriend and I wandered a little bit away from where most people were and stumbled upon what ended up being a huge amount of embedded plastic bags, random items and stringy things. While I was digging and pulling at this plastic, a LA Times reporter came over and briefly interviewed me for a story about the clean-up. I said much more than what ended up in the story, including some comments about companies making the items that end up in places like this should be made responsible for the whole lifecycle of the the items they make, including packaging. Green LA Girl picked up on and brought up this conflict of sorts and how it wasn't mentioned in the article. While I agree since I said something very similar to the reporter, at least there seems to be a decent enough collection rate on CRV items that my boyfriend and I only collected a single crv item - a glass drink bottle, during our 3 hours of cleaning up.
don't be fooled by the beauty...
...there's still trash and other things everyplace. The tree actually grew around the cart. There's plastic in the trees and stringy plasticy things all over.
a trash bin, mostly buried.
When I saw this, I couldn't help but to think to myself about people finding this crap stuck in what used to be the only freshwater source in this area of California, wondering what on earth us 20th and 21st century people were thinking. Why is there plastic, Styrofoam and carts everyplace? Any answer I could give, even today, doesn't speak positively of the society we've created. Because no one told us or showed us? Because we were too lazy? Because we figured it was someone elses' responsibility? Because we figured the part we could do was too small to matter?
Because of the Aquarius Spring sponsorship, the water provided at this event was a bit more wasteful than at the past FoLAR event I attended. At that event I brought along my Klean Kanteen, but FoLAR also provided reusable water bottles and access to a water cooler. The result was no single use water bottles! I was curious how this would be handled this time, but brought along my water bottle anyway. As expected, we received water in single use plastic bottles. On one hand I was disappointed as I know that FoLAR knew how to do things in a less wasteful way. At the same time, I understood and could sympathize with the reply I got from a FoLAR representative in that some things come at a cost. FoLAR also sold and gave away reusable bottles that day in addition to the bottled water.
Overall it was a good event. We had some difficulties with the water situation, but it seems that FoLAR is very receptive, understanding and willing to try to fix these things. I was happy to find out that FoLAR is helping with the Heal the Bay/Coastal Clean-up Day event this year after some problems with the Heal the Bay sponsored event last year at the same location. It does make me frustrated and sad and countless other things to see all of the trash in the LA River, obvious or buried deep in the river beds. This section of the LA River is endlessly fascinating to me after getting a chance to spend time there over the past few years and conveniently easily accessible from public transportation. I find the experience to be somewhat meditative, wandering through tiny slices of nature, cleaning up the city along the way and learning things that nothing else has taught me in such concrete manner.
If you have time this next weekend, FoLAR is holding another clean-up event in Cypress Park.
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