Name: Charlie Cloud

Social Justice Group: 2018-2019, Ocean Health

Date of Fieldwork: December 18, 2018

Name of Organization: Senator Dianne Feinstein of California

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Alexis Segal, Ocean health advisor for Senator Dianne Feinstein

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did:

We called Alexis Segal to talk about the damages of different water pollution and what she does in her government position to bring attention to that.

What I learned:

We learned more closely about what the Pacific garbage patch and how detrimental the effects of it are to not only the surrounding wildlife but to us. When fish ingest plastic that leaves a lot of fish with plastic inside of them and when fishermen come to catch lease fish they sell them to people to eat. This allows thousands to maybe millions of people indirectly eating plastic. This especially is bad for young children because it affects the growing brain.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

During the interview, I learned that there are a lot of methods to fix this and it’s not going to be the work of one person to clean this mess up. A 21-year-old boy named Boyan Slat made a big machine to go out into the Pacific Garbage Patch and clean as much garbage as he could. The device has two boats a far distance away from each other and a modified net connecting two so he can drag the garbage back to shore. Though many scientists think this is a bad idea because more pollution will come in and he can never fully clean it plus his device can’t get the pollution under the ocean, he still made an impacted and picked up 1.8 trillion pounds of trash. This shows how if one person’s idea can make such an impact, imagine what millions of people could do. It might take one person to change the world, but it takes a bigger group to initiate it.