Essay 3

Protect Our Environment and Health by Keeping Our Community and Waterways Clean Today

Please come and help address our annual community clean-up needs on May 11 at city hall. Together we can host a gathering and find better solutions to the litter we pick-up every year. Let’s clean-up our community in a way that has never been done before in the past and establish environmental regulations of our own even within our households to combat illegal dumping and protect our environment. Although the City of Aleknagik has an annual clean-up drive for our roadsides we need to extend our clean-up bases because our natural lake beaches, wild creeks, and pollution in our lake need attention, too!

Did you know that you may have helped to eliminate or contribute to a cycle of trash that is twirling in the Great Ocean Pacific estimated to be the largest garbage dump in the world that measures from the coast of California to Japan and is 90 feet deep? Shocking, isn’t it? Believe it or not, it’s true. Fabien Cousteau refers to it as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Fabien’s famous grandfather Jacques Cousteau dedicated his life to protecting the world’s oceans and sea life (Cousteau). With this same sentiment, perhaps we as a community can work together and pull our resources to help clean our waterways before it becomes a health hazard to us and the animals we depend upon for survival.

We know our lake runs through the Woodriver system to Nushagak Bay and onto the Bering Sea which of course is part of the Great Pacific Ocean. The earth is covered by 70 percent of life giving water and includes our lake and river systems from our region in Alaska. The environment we live in is fragile and we have been appointed as caretakers of this vast and beautiful part of the world we live in. Let’s get together and plan a clean-up that focuses on our lake, creeks, and riversides. This effort will not be in vain as we help protect our natural food sources that depend on fresh water free from debris as we do.

The largest sockeye salmon harvest in the world comes from Bristol Bay. We need to give back to our environment because our livelihood comes from our waterways the nursery of fisheries. The belugas and seals depend upon our waterways to be healthy. What sort of debris may be found in the twirling “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” I mentioned earlier? Well, nets, fishing nets are choking and killing sea mammals. And, 90 percent of the garbage there is plastic! If I remember correctly our clean-up seems to meet that percentage easily when we are picking up trash along roadsides. The plastic bags are numerous especially around our landfills.

We can meet our clean-up needs and address most of these issues with little cost to the city and community members. By using resources we have in place now like our Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling Grant, we can extend our use of the grant and include our waterways. The Tribal Environmental Program and our Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation can also assist with our efforts to clean-up our community and waterways. I suspect that there are other potential agencies to guide us in the areas of what, how and when the best time to do a clean-up specifically for waterways would incur. We all know that the best time to address this effort would probably be in the fall when the water levels are low enough to span the lake fronts and reach debris on the bottom of the lake. In the meantime, we can continue do our annual clean-up along roadsides, at our landfills, and in our yards until we have a good grasp of a waterway clean-up and how we can best tackle that attempt.

We all contribute to the debris we see around us and it is up to us to see that we clean-up after ourselves as our parents taught us to do at an early age when we cleaned our rooms and did our chores. In the same manner, it is our responsibility to pass on to our youth what our parents passed onto us and continue to be environmental role models so hopefully their children will carry this knowledge into the future and share what we learned and did to keep our environment around us clean. In this case, we are taking back what we unintentionally or intentionally left on the land, along our riversides, in our lakes, and in the environment; garbage. Our livelihood and the animals depend on a healthy environment to prosper. Let’s make sure we are doing our part and not contributing to the debris in the Great Pacific Ocean, and not creating a garbage dump of our own in our waterways that are so crucial to all every living thing well into the future.

Works Cited
Cousteau, Fabien. Interview with Oprah Winfrey. “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” 22 April 2009. <http://www.oprah.com/article/world/environment/pkggoinggreen/20090422>