Volunteers clean up on Earth Walk

When Stephanie Barger led a group of volunteers to pick up trash in

Crystal Cove State Park on Saturday, there were only a few scraps of

it left. The week before, the annual California Coastal Cleanup Day

had removed most of the visible garbage. Now, nearly all that

remained were the specks: Styrofoam, bottle caps and tiny beads of

plastic, known as nurdles.

Barger, the executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation in

Costa Mesa, said those miniature bits of trash are the most deadly.

“We’re here to save the turtles from the nurdles,” she told the

crowd Saturday morning.

Barger’s group was one of many that went on treks through the

wilderness Saturday morning, as numerous locations throughout Los

Angeles and Orange counties hosted the second annual Great Earth

Walk. Although free to enter, the event seeks to raise money for

environmental organizations through pledges.

In all, eight nonprofit groups -- the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, the

Center for Biological Diversity, the Earth Resource Foundation, Hills

for Everyone, Journey to the Heart, the Ocean Defenders Alliance, the

Sierra Club and the Orange County Interfaith Coalition for the

Environment -- benefited from the funds raised.

For more than an hour, the approximately 40 participants at

Crystal Cove walked along the beach and picked up trash -- sometimes

with metal claws, sometimes by poking their gloved fingers into the

sand. By noon, most of the walkers had accumulated bags and buckets

full of refuse. Most of the litter was Styrofoam, which breaks easily

into chips.

“It always clumps off in little balls, but sometimes it looks like

shells,” said Liz Estes, 17, a senior at Northwood High School in

Irvine.

Most of the trash, Barger said, likely flowed down the Santa Ana

River, which starts near San Bernardino and passes through Corona,

Riverside and other cities. As a result, the beach at Crystal Cove

was littered with fragments, but fragments still large enough to

stick in an animal’s throat.

“I think it’s mostly mushed-up cups and stuff,” said Katie Keck,

an English major at Vanguard University who attended the walk with

several classmates.

While many volunteered to clean the beach on their own, a number

of groups also joined the event en masse. Apart from Vanguard, which

did the walk as part of its Costa Mesa City Serve 2005 outreach

campaign, the Arab American Council and the Corporate Attorneys Assn.

also lent a hand.

“We’re lawyers who actually do a good thing,” joked Julie Pierce,

an assistant general counsel with Toshiba. “I love this kind of

stuff. It makes you feel like you’re giving back to society.”

* MICHAEL MILLER covers education and may be reached at (714)

966-4617 or by e-mail at [email protected].