国家地理-2008-04-08 Coastal Cleanup 净滩大行动（在线收听）

Even as the first day of autumn hovers over American shores, traces of summer linger.
So, every year at this time, nearly half a million people step forward to help, to volunteer in an international coastal cleanup and the results can be staggering.  In the last couple of years alone, an average of 8 million pounds of trash is collected worldwide. 

Please, watch where you put your feet, watch what you grab with your hands, we have found in the past hypodermic needles, we found drug paraphernalia.

From California to New Jersey, and here along the banks of the Potomac River just outside Washington DC, people don protective gear and comb the coast for trash.

Thirty-five glass bottles...

From cigarette butts to candy wrappers, every little item is recorded by the Ocean Conservancy, the sponsor of the cleanup since it started in 1986. 

Because a lot of our trash that's found unfortunately is not coming off ships in the dark of night,it's coming from land, you know, areas, people who were at the beaches, people who were inland, and things are washing downstream. 

Disgusting, all that's out here, I was so shocked. When I came out here, I thought, oh, you know, people don't litter that much, and I just see stuff on the side of the road, then we've come up here, it's just everywhere.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Actually we can pick a lot of that up one day and then, the next day come back, and there just twice as much as it was the day before. So, it seems like there is no end to the, the trash.

At this site, 2,000 pounds of trash were collected in just an hour and a half. Despite their obvious progress, in many places such as here along the Potomac River, the work is far from over.

The river is going to require continued, maintained efforts for many generations to come but we are getting there, this is a sign that the next generation is going to care about the resource and is gonna wanna pass it on to the next generation improved.

Everywhere water meets land the goal of this cleanup is the same, to beatify and restore coastlines and to get people to think about how they dispose of their own garbage. So autumn's wind will blow cold but perhaps not so clattered.