While I was walking along a beach on the Gulf of Alaska, I was wondering where the smell of gas was coming from. When I got closer to the smell I looked into the water and I saw a lot of dirty used oil in the ocean. I was really mad that noone had done anything about it. I was even angrier when I saw a lot of dead fish, mammals and birds. I hurried to my house and called the Dept. of Fish and Wildlife and told them about what I found down on the beach.

They were so shocked they were over here in no time. I told them that I would volunteer my time to help them, and I called my boss and told him that I wouldn't be going to work for a week or so. He was really mad and he asked me all sorts of questions about why I wouldn't be working. When I told him about the oil spill he said that it wasn't important and that if I didn't come back to work I would be fired. I got so mad I told him that there were other jobs and that cleaning up the oil spill was more important and hung up. Then I went to work cleaning up the oil spill.

I was really curious about how the oil spill happened so I started investigating. First, I went to the boat harbor and checked all the boats. There I discovered two people in a boat trying to clean dirty oil from their hands. When I looked into the boat I found four empty 55 gallon tanks that smelled like the dirty oil on the beach. Then I reported my find to the police. It turned out the boat belonged to my old boss, and he was sent to jail for a year for dumping oil in the ocean.

I thought that we would be finished cleaning up the oil in a week but we kept finding more oil. I was very curious again so I went down to the beach very quietly at night and I saw two more people who worked for my old boss dumping more oil in the ocean. The next night I brought the clean-up boss with me down to the beach to identify who they were. He got really mad and told the police about it. Then the police arrested everyone who was connected with the dumping and they shut down my old bosse's business. After that, within a month most of the oil and dead animals were cleaned up and the beach started coming back to life again.

By: Tanya Peter

World Conservation

The circle symbolizes te biosphere-the thin covering of the planet that contains and sustains life. The three interlocking, overlapping arrows symbolize the three ofjectives of conservation: - maintenance of essential ecological processes and life-support systems; -preservationof genetic diversity -sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems.