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Deuce & Pacer, taking a much-deserved break at the Beach Cleanup
We love this photo of this past Saturday’s Beach Cleanup. Deuce and Pacer did a great job, didn’t they? Volunteers work very hard on this cleanup every year, in sunny weather like we had Saturday and in biting storms. The all-volunteer Grass Roots Garbage Gang is a truly committed lot and every single participant, be they soup makers or beach cleaners, deserves a BIG pat on the back.
It’s not that local residents are dumping on the beach, making huge cleanup efforts three times a year a necessity. The tides bring a lot of garbage; junk dumped at sea, near and far. The biggest problem is all the plastic. Take a moment, if you will, and watch Plastics Never Go Away, a short slide presentation that explains the impact of plastics existing and degrading in our environment.
So all these folks go out and pull TONS of trash off our beach three times a year and it makes an impact. I think back to the years before Shelly Pollock’s brain child of a cause became the effort that it is today and I shudder. I had NO IDEA back then how big the problem really was. It has been estimated that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by entanglement in or ingestion of plastics.
If you’ve not heard about the continent-sized gyre known as the Pacific Garbage Patch, an oceanic landfill, the largest in the world, please, take a few moments to educate yourself. How It Works has a nice description. There’s a FaceBook cause you can join to learn more (The Grass Roots Garbage Gang has a FaceBook page as well).
GreenPeace has an excellent bit of animation that describes how all that trash gets stuck at sea. Be sure to click on “The Journey of Trash” where you can control a timeline to see the progression. The collection at sea has to do with light winds, currents, floating trash and wide open sea, swirling slowly. Low energy means the trash just swirls around and doesn’t make it to land. It just sits out there, polluting our ocean and killing wildlife.
I guess I’ll be grateful we have trash to clean up.
More Info: www.ourbeach.org/
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My wife & I traveled south to Long Beach on Saturday to do a little shopping at The Planter Box — they have more native plants there than all the nurseries in north county combined! After picking out several nice plants, we decided to reward our two dogs with a run on the beach.
We saw the Beach Clean-Up signs and were anticipating a crowded beach, at least by Washington standards! But we were very surprised to find few people on the sands. We later learned that the clean-up had been held that morning — we didn’t make it to Long Beach until mid-afternoon.