ESSO in Action
Hello again! I’m back to talk about my club, Beach Cleanup, as we have a cookout coming soon. If the weather is good, it will hopefully be held this Sunday. We will be cleaning Seabrook Beach and then heading over to Hampton Beach to have a cookout. There will be hot dogs, burgers, chips, fruit and everything that makes a cookout great. Come to clean the beach or to throw a Frisbee along the shoreline with a hot dog in hand. Send senior Issay Matsumoto or me an e-mail if you want us to save you a seat!
Now I want to explain what Beach Cleanup is, how we work and exactly why it’s the greatest club on campus! In short, Beach Cleanup is exactly what it sounds like: We go to a beach, namely Seabrook Beach and clean it up. The first Sunday of every month, Ms. Schoene, who directs the cleanups and is also a very nice librarian on our campus, sends out emails to members of the Unitarian Universalist church across the way from the Elm Street Dining Hall and the Beach Cleanup club assists Ms. Schoene by providing plenty of volunteers. Ms. Schoene organizes everything by bringing gloves, trash bags, many more items and a sheet on which we document what is picked up from the beach. The information from said sheet is sent to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation. Other groups all along the northeastern coast send similar information from their beaches to the Blue Ocean Society.
You may be wondering if our club consists of going out in bright orange jumpsuits with trash bags and sticks, picking up trash as we go. Actually, we go in casual clothing and judiciously differentiate trash and recycling. Seabrook Beach is also not a beach covered in industrial sludge. It is a beautiful golden beach with cerulean ocean that crashes on the jetty’s rocks. This begs the question: Why clean up a beach that is already pretty? Seabrook Beach is just one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of beaches affected by water pollution. We are not only cleaning the trash of the locals, but also the trash of those on the other side of the world. Trillions of tiny plastic pellets enter the ocean every day. These pellets move around for years, never degrading. Eventually, some will wash up on Seabrook Beach, where we collect them for proper disposal.
Beach Cleanup is a staple of community service, and I genuinely believe that if you have not signed up for it, you have yet to sign up for ESSO. Simply, we clean beaches, but we do much more by raising awareness of water pollution through our data collection and saving the lives of many animals that ingest these indigestible plastics, only to starve to death from plastic accumulation in their stomachs. So please, come to Beach Cleanup at least once this year. Listen to Mr. Trafton, our faculty adviser, educate us about environmental info or just come to be on the beach. I promise that you will find an environmentally conscious self you may have never known you had.