What brings me back today was a presentation I heard recently. It was about saving our beaches and the wildlife that makes them home. The garbage that washes up that will be there for years is almost unimaginable. The figures that she presented just from one areas' cleanup efforts were in the hundreds of thousands in terms of trash - 466,000 cigarette butts in the Monterey beach area alone.
She also discussed the different ways that local wildlife is affected by the garbage that we produce. Nothing I can say here can get the point across better than this video: http://blog.oceanconservancy.org/2013/03/28/midway-film-tells-story-of-plastics-in-our-ocean-through-plight-of-albatross/
It will break your heart.
So what can I do? What can WE all do? Maybe it doesn't seem like a lot, but along with my camera I took a couple of other things to the beach: some gloves and a trash bag. And as I took my pictures I picked up the items that littered the beach and carried them off of the beach. And I made a more conscious effort to avoid plastic water bottles. Because of where we have our house in Nevada, we have to drink bottled water. So we have always taken our gallon jugs and refilled them as long as it was sanitary to do so. And when I bought the smaller bottles of water I made an effort to reuse those bottles as well for a couple of days. I even looked for ways to reuse them AFTER I reused them - cutting the tops off and using them to cover seedlings in the garden - like a miniature greenhouse. But we still have to do more. We have to cut out plastic getting into our oceans or land areas where birds will mistake it for a food source and end up dying a slow death after ingesting enough of it.
Then, the saddest part of all. This seal had been on the beach for months, but the closest I had been to it was to try to keep Kiri and Ryker from a close inspection of the poor creature. But this time I did get closer and I found that it too, had been a victim of men. Maybe even intentionally. And I am angry. Are you?
NOW:
These are the only things that we should find on our beach. Please consider becoming part of a cleanup - a beach, a desert, a park, a river, a highway. Anything. And think about keeping a pair of gloves and a trash bag with you when you go out to enjoy these places. I am.
