A Little Litter Goes A Long Way

Every little scrap of litter along our roads has a story. Every little bit of junk, left behind by someone along the sidewalk, has some reason it's there. Each layer of an illegal dump belonged to someone before it made its contribution to a roadside polluting distraction and usually into a river. What’s more, it doesn’t take much litter to mess with a place. A little litter goes a long way, unfortunately. Wouldn’t it be great if litter could talk?

An empty soda can rolling down the road, dodging traffic could scream out, “I just flew out of John Doe’s red Ford pickup! He didn’t mean to lose me – he was aiming for the bed of the truck!” A candy wrapper, with bits of melting chocolate in the summer sun, could look innocently up from the hot sidewalk and whisper, “Psst…Suzie went that way…tell her to come back and get me.” That refrigerator on the riverbed could hold up a sign: “Take me home! I miss Jane Doe’s kitchen!”

In other words, the history of pieces of litter. This is a fascination of mine – how stuff gets from point A to point B. Found items can be interesting and revolting at the same time. In the end, however, it’s not so much the item of litter itself that holds the key to understanding the problem, but the story of how and who got it there in the first place. Why would a person, knowing good and well that their conscious choice to litter screams wrongness in so many ways, go ahead and litter?

Though so much of our area is clean most of the time, small amounts stand out that much more – on sidewalks, along roadsides, at illegal dumps, or blowing in the wind trying to find a place to land. It’s like bad news getting all the attention when good news is happening most of the time.

I could spend this space on other things, I suppose, but litter seems to be a common denominator in too many of the continuing woes upon which we invest time and money and energy. Litter (along with graffiti and buildings falling in on themselves) is an ingredient in the cycle of community frustration that, though the majority may not cause it, affects every single person in the community. It only takes a few to effect the whole. It’s time for the majority to more convincingly demand change.

Litter influences the potential business investor (with jobs to bring), who has only a few days to get some first impressions of our area. It influences the potential first-time homebuyers as they drive around on a Sunday afternoon dreaming of where they might buy. Ask them if they’d rather purchase the house they love on the constantly littered street or whether they’ll settle for that second choice where it seems a well kept neighborhood.

I'm convinced that if we could just spend as much time on figuring out the original causes of litter, rather than spending all our time on looking at it and using resources to clean it up once it becomes litter, we'd all have a better chance at preventing it in the first place. This is the difference in prevention and reaction. Reacting to something like litter calls up all sorts of ugly emotional things – frustration, frowns, confusion, and distraction. It’s already happened. It’s done. And the only thing you can do at that point is take time and walk over to pick up that bag of junk of the middle of the parking lot yourself or pass it up for someone to get around to since “it’s their job.”

Any way you go on that path the cumulative damage is done – to the overall community appearance, to the person’s conscious that chose to leave it in the first place, and to your attitude when you see it callously junking up your town.

On the other hand, prevention is a lot less concrete and more intimidating. It’s hard to see it working, hard to see what isn’t there that might have been.

My hope continues to be this: that the act of having to pick up litter around out home will disappear when more people refuse to litter. My sincere dream is that you will no longer have spend your valuable energy on clean-up days and that city, county, and state money once spent on cleaning up dumps and litter will be spent on more positive items like community centers, the arts, downtown revitalization, and new tourism endeavors.

So here’s the challenge. In an effort to better understand why litter persists in our community in some places I want to hear back from some litterbugs. There are obviously some out there, so let’s hear about what makes littering so fun and exciting in your hometown and region, a place where the vast majority of us want a 100% clean community.

E-mail me at: www.mountainfocusart@gmail.com with your adventurous littering stories and the rest of us will try to understand why you find it so thrilling.