Costal Clean-Up Day
As waves lapped at the grassy sand of Heron’s Head park on San Francisco’s industrial eastern shoreline Saturday, 85 volunteers picked up old cans, plastic bags, pieces of metal, cigarette butts, beer bottles, paper, glass, knives, shoes and more and put it all in trash bins.
Though just one coastal clean-up effort of 800 happening in California and about 8,000 worldwide on Saturday - International Coastal Clean-up Day – the work here perhaps epitomized both the hope and dire need represented in this annual event. Heron’s Head shoreline park lies in the shadow of a shuttered electric power plant whose waste is alleged to have caused high rates of illness in the neighborhood. And it’s less than a mile upstream from an EPA Superfund site where lead and radioactive waste are being culled from the sandy soil.
“This is part of the mitigation of all the burdens this neighborhood has endured. There are a disproportionate number of folks with health problems here and over 300 toxins have been found in the soil around here,” said Anthony Khalil, an ecologist and educator with the Literacy for Environmental Justice, a local community organization which set up the coastal clean up at Heron’s Head and numerous other parks along the eastern shores of San Francisco.
The 24th annual International Coastal Clean-up on Saturday, which was organized by the Ocean Conservancy and co-sponsored by numerous organizations including Earth Day Network, is expected to have drawn 400,000 volunteers cleaning up more than 7,000 sites around the world. Some are beaches and parks used for recreation but many others are sites being reclaimed from decades of disregard by industry and people dumping garbage into the ocean.
Heron’s Head shoreline park and Khalil’s organization are located in Bayview Hunter’s Point, San Francisco’s poorest neighborhood and a new epicenter of the environmental justice movement. A bitter paste when local industry spewed all sorts of things from these sandy shores are being met here with a new determination among residents to take back their neighborhood and create open spaces for recreation as well as saying ‘enough’ to water pollution.
“It’s really important to show the solidarity among people wanting to clean up our coasts,” said John Viet, a 24-year-old volunteering here that day. “To have a day when folks come to the coasts all around the world and take care of them is amazing.”
Last year, the International Coastal Clean up removed 6.8 million pounds of debris from 6,485 sites in 100 countries and 42 U.S. states. The importance of the day was illustrated by what they found among the garbage: last year volunteers found 443 animals entangled or trapped by marine debris. About half of them were alive. The Ocean Conservancy has not yet reported on the findings or total beach clean-ups of this year. But last year they also found, in places where environmental laws are lax, beaches so choked by debris that plants could not thrive and the local drinking water was contaminated.
“Trash littering our beaches and choking our ecosystems is a threat to wildlife, our coastal economies, and ultimately to the ability of the ocean to sustain us,” said Ocean Conservancy President Vikki Spruill. “The Cleanup gives everyone a chance to work in their backyards and be a part of this special movement to protect our ocean. Trash doesn’t fall from the sky, it falls from our hands, and what falls from human hands – can be prevented.”
In Richmond, California, on Saturday families spread out at the Point Isabel state park shoreline and picked up bits of trash while learning from organizers of the clean up just what harm the garbage was doing. About 120 high school students from nearby cities participated.
“I’m here because it is lab work for my class,” said Jennifer Xhang, a 16-year-old from Berkeley who is part of a whole new generation studying Environmental Science and thinking seriously about what to do to save our oceans and reverse climate change. “I feel like we’re telling people it’s time to care about the environment.”
