Friends of the Los Angeles River Clean up - Sponsered by Aquarius Springs
I took the subway and Orange Line over to Balboa Park, where I met up with Bryan for another Friends of the Los Angeles River clean up this morning.
looking down the LA River before we got started. At first it looked like it was going to rain, but by the end it sun came out and it was getting pretty warm.
They had some people talk from Friends of the Los Angeles River, Coca-cola and media on hand. Coke gave Friends of the Los Angeles River $50,000. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the event was sponsored by a water company, by the end of the clean up, they didn't have any more water! I don't think I've ever been to a clean-up without enough water provided to over compensate in the end. I don't know. If people clean up for 3 hours for you, for free, it is kinda nice to provide an essential like water, especially when sponsored by a company that sells just that. Bryan and I had one 500 mL bottle between the 2 of us.
people standing around, waiting to clean. I was getting anxious. I wanted to get going!
This time the river didn't seem as trashy as when we went in May to a clean-up. I'm not sure if it's because of lack of rain or what. Then again, when you look at something like this, it at first seems to be absent of trash...
but when you look at things up close, you can see tons of plastic embedded and tangled with everything else. I see at least 7 pieces of plastic visible there.
a single wheel sticking out of the ground, unremovable because the rest of the basket seems to be buried in the ground.
as I took this picture, the guy was telling the woman that he just came to the park, not planning on doing anything in particular, and decided to clean
this was an entrance to a little enclosed area within a bamboo forest. if I had to live along the la river, I would have chosen this area.
Bryan and I wandered to a direction away from where most people were. At first it looks ok, but there were plastic bags embedded in the ground and plants everyplace. As I was working on ripping some of this plastic out, a reporter for the LA Times came over and did a quick interview about why we were there and stuff. I'll keep my eyes on the newspaper to see if any of my comments were put in there! (Edit: The article is here. I did say those things, but they are even fragments of my statement. Before he asked this question, he prefaced it with "well this is sort of a...(I can't remember the word he used, but something like sensationalist) question. How does seeing this make you feel?" I said frustrated and sad. I also said a lot of other stuff and he told me I was the second QA person he talked to (he didn't know Bryan was QA as well. haha) He also had asked what was in our bag and we said plastic - bags and snack bags, straws. That was vaguely summarized in there are well. Not knowing what will end up in there is a risk you run for doing some sort of interview like this, I suppose.)
This are was just beyond the embedded plastic. The area was fun to walk around with all of the large granite blocks and it was super pretty with a huge tree.
to the left of the previous picture
the shopping cart was actually embedded in the tree because it had been there so long. I pulled a sock out of the sand that roots had grown through. Also notice all of the plastic bags and stringy things stuck in the tree branches. I spend a decent amount of time trying to pick up many stringy things. I think it was on my mind after I watched a pigeon walking around in Pasadena earlier this week with an involuntary plasticy-stringy bracelet around his foot and toes.
A trash bin, almost completely stuck in the ground. Right about this time I started to think about people trying to do archeological digs hundreds or thousands of years from now. Why exactly did these people dump plastic film and carts in their only surface water source? Is this what killed them? Why would someone do that? Did they just not realize what they were doing back in the 20th and early 21st century? (ok maybe it s a little dramatic, but it is somewhat how I feel right now. Once you see it, you feel like an idiot for ignoring it. This water flows to the ocean! It goes into our food supply. Then we eat it. Hm.
so pretty.....
......
and so ugly at the same time.