It Never Ends.....

During this past weekend, I had the opportunity to see first hand the desolation that plagues our environment. This activity consisted of helping to clean up Upper Carr Lake in Salinas. This activity was in association with the statewide Coastal Clean Up that took hold this past Saturday.

Members of the SJSU Environmental Resource Center (ERC) as well as students from around the greater area volunteered their time to help clean up this heavily neglected Lake. It was quite disturbing to find the wide amount of litter that engulfed the Lake. The things the people would put into this lake ranged of the most random things. This included finding street signs, tires, rims, bikes, mattresses, crap bags, desks, paint cans, strollers, and everything else that you can imagine. All in all, as a group we found over a 1,000 pounds of trash just by cleaning that one Lake. This is just an eye-popping number that caused me to have a weird churning feeling in my stomach. This feeling developed in the way that I felt a sense of guilt that our fellow community is doing this. As this once marvelous Lake has been diminished of its purity, and the innocent animals that are being threatened is quite a perturbing scene.

This experience helped me understand unlike anytime before that as a community we need to continue to work together to stop these things for happening, and continue to put the work in to our environment to have it remain pure and pristine.

There is still much to do to right the wrongs of the past, but there still is hope for the rest of us, when groups like the ERC and the many volunteers take time out of their busy schedules to help make our planet a cleaner place.