I joined the San Diego River Park Foundation today (8 November 2017) for the second time as a volunteer member of the River Rescue Team. This group gets together every Wednesday morning to remove trash from different sites along the San Diego River.

Last week's clean-up site was on a stretch of the river between Qualcomm Way and the 805 Freeway. Today it was in the Mission Valley Preserve near Morena Boulevard. In both places the heavily urban landscape looks like it's awkwardly but surely on its way to becoming more natural. The thin, sluggish river is hedged on all sides by busy, multi-lane roads and freeways. It's also followed by the green line of the San Diego Trolley System, which weaves its way over and alongside the stream. Luxury apartment buildings draw value from their proximity to this transit system and to the green corridor afforded by the river (one such complex is even named "River Colony"). They overlook its banks and floodplains, which are covered in a tangled mix of both native and invasive flora. It's in here that the River Rescue Team does its work. The verdant edges of the river are crisscrossed everywhere by official biking and walking paths as well as unofficial trails leading to small camps inhabited by homeless people. It's no secret that homelessness is an issue that is rapidly escalating in San Diego. We come upon many encampments, both active and inactive, as we pick up trash in the maze-like network of trails in the brush.

Today we gathered what seemed to be two types of trash: stuff that's been washed downstream during periods of heavy rain, and stuff that's been discarded by the homeless people living along the river. Everywhere there are plastic cups, pizza boxes, glass bottles, tissues and batteries. There's also what looks like piles of household waste, perhaps emptied out onto the ground by a riverbed resident looking for something useful. We're careful around the homeless encampments. We have to make sure that the ones that we clean up have been properly abandoned and that we aren't just taking people's things. Usually it's pretty easy to tell: there's a deflated mattress covered in dead leaves, or blankets and clothes half buried in the earth. 

People always seem particularly concerned when they hear that we find needles, but today I found an empty bottle of oxycodone, a type of opioid pain medication, and I thought that this was in a way much sadder. It seems that the growing number of people who are homeless in San Diego is linked to the growing severity of the opioid epidemic all over the US. The number of homeless encampments near the river is on the rise and with them so is the quantity of trash, once again showing how inextricable social issues are from environmental ones.

There's actually a much more severe addiction at the root of this trash problem in our urban green spaces. It's our addiction to disposable stuff. Every time I find a Starbucks cup in the dirt I mourn the little time that it spent being of value before it became curse. Pharmaceutical companies must stop pushing for the regular prescription of opioids. As the giant 7-eleven "Big Gulp" cups piled up in my trash bag, I found myself thinking that it was also time for the companies that make consumer goods to stop nurturing our sense of entitlement to convenience.