Carliane Johnson is about to dive into a narrow channel of water, just about five or six feet between the dock and the seawall. She won’t have to dive deep to find what she’s looking for.
“The population can explode all of a sudden, and we’ll be pulling a lot,” she says. “Some can be six or seven feet long. It’s a lot of plant material, and I just bring it to the docks, someone grabs it, and I go back and look for more.”
It’s a cool gray morning at the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline in Oakland, California. Over 80 volunteers are working along the shoreline picking up trash, pulling out non-native plants, and preparing to restore it to its natural state.
“You would think that you would find like bottles and plastic and stuff, but we found a lot of these white tops. I guess they were like black and mild tops,” says Nneka Anyanwu student from Skyline High School in Oakland.
