Garbage, Man

Lexi squeals with joy as I pick her up, plop her into her stroller and click the buckles to secure her. Her excitement tends to know no bounds when it comes to our walks around the neighborhood. As always I gather our supplies for the journey, consisting of Lexi’s snacks and water for the both of us and of course a convenient garbage grabber, a plastic bag for garbage, and a second bag for recyclables because why go for a walk when you can instead go for a walk plus also pick up trash along the way.

I lock the door, set out into the midday sun and feel the unseasonably warm February wind blow across our faces. As we venture along, her stroller thumping at each sidewalk’s crack, I stop here and there, click her wheels to the lock position so she won’t roll away, and grab up the litter that dots the roadside.

How it arrives at this unsightly state will forever remain a mystery to me. I can’t for the life of me understand what causes people--so many people; it seems--to be litterbugs, especially considering there is a $1000 fine here in Georgia for littering. In a world in which a trash can is never more than a few steps from any store entry or office lot, it baffles me that anyone would choose to throw refuse from their car window rather than take the minimal effort to dispose of it properly. I simply can’t understand the mindset of neglecting our environment.

My daughter and I, and my wife when she joins our hikes, do our part to beautify the neighborhood. We feel a duty to remove the trash that accumulates in the ditch not simply for aesthetics, but also for the health and well-being of the environment, keeping the trash from washing downstream and into the waterways, to ensure the safety of the animals that might be foolhardy enough to consume the plastics or Styrofoam, and to eliminate the mosquito breeding grounds provided by pooling water inside a Chik-Fil-A or Starbucks cup or the rodent-attracting bags and boxes of rotting Popeye’s chicken bones.

With Lexi locked in place, happily crunching on her snack crackers and chewing on raisins, I yank garbage from beneath a tangle of weeds. I’m retrieving garbage that is so weathered and brittle that it sometimes falls apart, having been there neglected and overlooked for years before anyone had a thought or bothered enough to clean it up. It seems a lonely endeavor, cleaning up roadside garbage. One wonders about the littering habits of drivers of the cars that pass. Was it you? Were you the one who drives this route every day, throwing wrappers to the wind, your daily fast food indulgences floating carelessly toward the wild flowers? Speeding along this route per your everyday habit, seeing but not seeing the blight that mars your world, pretending the mess doesn’t exist and doesn’t belong to you, to all of us, leaving it forever for someone else to clean, for someone else to pick up. It is frustrating, but I just crave to see that other people sometimes care as much as Lexi and I do.

I do, however wonder at why it seems no matter how much I do, how much I clean up, it accumulates. It piles up so swiftly, and takes so much effort to clean. Ever-present flow of waste, cascading across the ditches and gutters, no end in sight since the only ones not littering are those few of us out here picking up the trash from everybody else. The other thing that sets me to ire is the fact that a good lump of what I pick up is alcohol bottles, cans, everything from cute little single-serve Grand Marnier and gin bottles, to 40 oz. malt liquor, piles of Bud Light cans to fat plastic Taaka vodka bottles which leads me to believe that there are an awful lot of people out there drinking in their cars or trucks, guzzling down 1.75mL bottles and hurling the empties out the window as they careen dangerously along to potentially kill somebody. It feels like you see the worst of mankind by picking up the things they leave along the roadside. You see their gluttony, their shame, their secret thirsts, their sheer laziness and ineptitude and their utter selfish disregard.

Then I see my daughter’s smile as she watches me bend and stoop and grumble about the state of our world. I tell her how good a job she’s doing by helping me pick up trash. I tell her that she’s going to be a steward of this Earth; she’s going to do her part to beautify every space she occupies. She already does her part, she's great at taking recyclables to the bin, throwing them inside, she loves this. I tell her how wonderful she is, I thank her for pointing out the tiny bits of trash that I miss. I teach her colors by pointing out the different hues on flapping wrappers and crumpled cans. I point out butterflies, birds and anthills and lift her out so she can sniff wild flowers and feel the softness of their petals. I do my best to instill in her the things that I want to see more of in this world. She'll be a powerful force for change, she'll persist, nevertheless!

Climate change is real and happening swiftly because of the carelessness of humans, burning dirty coal, dumping toxins, pollutants into the environment with rampant reckless abandon, causing the extinction of dozens of species per year so it’s crucial, critical now more than ever before that we each do our part, try a little more, do a little better, it starts with just making that little effort to recycle, to get out there and clean up your neighborhood, take ownership of your world, help make it a better world, if not for you, then for those that come after you, the next generation. Now more than ever, we need people to start vying for life, we can’t live without this planet; we’d better start treating the Earth with some respect and working to protect her.

We will never rid the world of garbage, it’s the cost of our consumption, it is ever-present, but then again, so is beauty, it’s beneath and around the decomposing pizza box, it’s in the box itself in the forms of colonies of creatures seeking opportunities to thrive. It’s in the workout I get from bending and stooping and in the satisfaction I feel by doing my part. There is a positive side to everything, an upside to every woe. It’s in the monthly trip to the metal recycler to trade cans for cash. It’s in my daughter’s smile as she helps by throwing each tidbit of trash she can find into the bag.

If I can instill in her the same love and passion for the environment that I have, I’ll have succeeded as a father and as a citizen of the Earth. I hope I might inspire a reader or two out there to feel the same way. We need more stewards of this Earth; we need to train the next generation of environmentalists. I have hope that we can stand up to the assault that every day threatens wildlife, forests, and waterways. This is important for all our sake.

Specific action that you can take right now is to visit Sweep the Hooch to volunteer for the cleanup along the Chattahoochee River on April 8th. See you there!



Thanks for reading. Peace!


For more information on actions you can take to protect our environment, please visit:
Natural Resources Defense Council
Trees Atlanta
Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Treehugger
EPA
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)