Have you ever sat down at the shore, and looked out upon the waves that crash upon it? With each tug of the moon’s gentle craters, the ocean scratches away at the shore line before receding back toward its amorphous mass.
Perhaps your view of the horizon, the sea foam, the sky, the blazing sun, the sand and the sky is corrupted by something that seems out of place. Rubbish.
To change the scene, imagine working in a corporate office and seeing records of customer phone calls with notes like:
customer called in to cancel their service
they dispute their bill
wants to complain
Which service did they want to cancel? Which bill and what charge did they want to dispute? What did they want to complain about, and why?
An ordinary person, reading these notes, would no doubt become frustrated, a customer seething on the other end of a phone line, and you’d hope the next time they leave a note on an account it would be a bit more insightful and detailed.
Therefore, if we swing our perspective back down the road, and stare back out at the ocean, why do we tolerate the empty chocolate wrapper travelling down the shore, the discarded beer cans, crushed into the sand, and the wastes of humans left behind?
Transient though we may be, the saying at so many national parks resonates with me constantly.
Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints
I haven’t seen the statistics on fines for littering or illegal dumping. All I know is that every day, some irresponsible sack of shit is dropping rubbish on the ground, or dumping waste into a river, or leaving something other than their footprints.
Where I live, it is a relatively clean sort of place, with rubbish not often choking the gutters of streets and waterways. But still, things belong in places.
If they can be reused, reuse it. If it can be recycled, recycle it. If it can be repaired, repair it. If it needs to be rubbish, then put it in the (right) bin.
It isn’t just places like our beaches and rivers. They don’t belong to you. They don’t belong to your county, the council, the shire, or the country. They belong to the planet. Some people are motivated to look after these things, and others fail to understand the consequences of their actions.
For every person I watch put their litter on the ground, or throw it from their car window, I am instilled with a sense of dejection and apathy for the ecological future.
Perhaps instead of:
Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints
We should reason:
Take nothing but the trash of others, leave nothing but footprints..
I know it is impossible to pick up every piece of rubbish you see, but all you need to do is set an example. If the custodians of these national parks stacked the refuse they found among the creeks and trails into entrances, and left them there, it would should the collective scale of one act of littering, distributed among the aggregate visitors.
If you walk beyond the rubbish, you tolerate its existence. If you don’t see it, then you’re part of the problem. If you walk past it, it is a reflection of your own care for our world, constructed or natural.