I lived very close to the Mississippi river. My friends and I would always climb down the cliffs and skip rocks off the sand patches. One day we dared my friend to swim in the river and go all the way under. We told him that we would pay him 40 dollars. Now if you're from Minnesota you know how gross the river is. You can see where the sewage runs into it and you have definitely heard about all of the dead bodies they find in there. Well my friend knew all of this and decided that 40 bucks was well worth it. He swam out there and dunked his head under, two weeks later he was on bed rest with bronchitis and vertigo.

When I got to Montana and saw people floating down the river, I was shocked. I then started noticing how clean the streets were and how I didn't have to step through trash as I walked through town. The water was clear, the air was fresh, and the town was spotless. I never thought St. Paul's sanitation was bad. I thought it was pretty clean compared to New York or New Orleans, and it is, but it is still a gross major city. I now feel extremely lucky to be living in Missoula. No it is not perfect and it can be grungy in some areas, but if I can come here and feel a change in my skin and lungs, they must be doing something right.

I think that people in bigger cities need to be more aware of the messes they are creating. Cities are materialistic. That is where companies are advertising, producing, and selling their goods. Because of this, people from the outskirts of the cities and the people living within the metro areas are all buying and wasting in the same place. It is difficult to figure out how we can make this problem go away, because it is a matter of everyone participating. They advertised and forced the "go green" stuff on us back home too, but it just didn't have as great of an impact in some places. If we really want things to change, we need to enforce more laws and have more consequences, otherwise no one is going to listen.