Environmentalists, students do part to keep coast clean

Volunteers foraged up and down the California coastline for California Coastal Cleanup Day last Saturday, stooping like egrets to pick up pieces of trash from the sand and fishing them out of the water.

Just north of the international border at Border Field State Park, a group of students from Chula Vista’s High Tech High were part of the effort. California Coastal Cleanup Day is held in conjunction with coastal cleanup events around the world, and aims to teach stewardship and responsibility for the world’s oceans.

“We brought most of our team, which is 53 students, to come and have hands-on experience of the pollution that comes down through the binational watershed, the Tijuana Valley Watershed,” said Nuvia Ruland, 36, a biology and environmental science teacher at High Tech High in Chula Vista chaperoning the students during the cleanup.

“This was an opportunity for them to not only kind of understand how the trash travels and contaminants and pollutants travel, but also for them to see the quantity and the type of pollutants.”

She said she hopes seeing where the trash goes will inspire students to think more about what products they use, how they use them and how they dispose of them later. It is especially important in areas like the Tijuana Watershed, which covers more than 1700 square miles across two countries and is known as a world biodiversity hotspot.

“I enjoy picking up trash because I know it’s going to have an effect, no matter how small, on the environment,” said Salvador Castillo, 16, an 11th grader at High Tech High School. “I think it’s a really good eye-opening experience to see how much of our trash that we think won’t end up over here on the beach actually does.”

“A lot of people just really don’t care of the effect,” said 17-year-old Esteban Sanchez. “And they don’t even know — they don’t know that a lot of the plastic just kills animals because they end up swallowing it, where it just harms our environment and our oceans. They don’t know, so I wasn’t too surprised. I kind of expected this.”

“I was actually really surprised,” said their classmate, Melissa Concepcion, 15. “I saw a lot of bottlecaps and cigarettes all over, and since the border’s over there, a lot of people can’t go over there and clean up.”

Melissa was referring to the maze-like complex of fences and bars that separates the United States and Mexico. It’s surrounded by border agents who keep a watchful eye out for people near the barred walls, getting in jeeps and intercepting them on the sand if they venture too close.

“The border’s over there and a lot of people can’t go over there and clean up, and I think that’s the spot where most people should clean up, actually, because that’s where the Tijuana River is, and there’s a bunch of trash over there,” she said.

Keeping the area clean is especially important in areas of extraordinary sensitivity and biological diversity like the Tijuana River Valley region, said Shannon Tunks, a volunteer coordinator with the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, an organization that partners with state and federal governments to maintain U.S. coastal systems. It is part of the Tijuana River Action Network, which consists of non-governmental agencies, NGOs in Mexico and local nonprofits.

“This is one of our first events of the year,” said Tunks. “So we’ll have a restoration event next week, events every week, culminating in a cleanup of Goat Canyon on October 17th. It’s great!”

Tunks said that this time of year is dedicated to major educational outreach and stewardship programs across Southern California and Baja California, because it falls directly between the end of nesting season for the California least tern and the western snowy plover and the beginning of the rainy season — a major issue this year, because of an impeding El Niño that may be one of the largest on record.

“This was a really good time to go in and clean out all the things that’ve washed up with the high tides over the last six months,” she said.