Once, not too long ago, on a cool spring evening, I stood by a secluded little slough near my father’s childhood home. Here he and his siblings used to swim in clear waters on a hot summer afternoon. Today we came to see if the beaver and other creatures were out. The geese fluttered noisily overhead when we accidentally startled them from their grassy roost. Other geese could be heard honking a distance away on the lake and red-winged blackbirds and other species filled the air with music. Nearby, a large beaver lodge could be seen rising from the water, and ducks floated in and out of reeds. The air was fresh and quiet.
I stepped closer to the water to see if I could squint at those fairly distant ducks and see what species they were and I looked down to avoid tripping over anything. And I sighed. A beer can lay on its side in the grasses, and a bottle was jammed, upside down, in the mud right next to the water. It was jammed in too tightly to be an accident. Goose footprints could clearly be seen wending their way around this disruption.
Sadly, this sort of blatant disrespect for our planet is not only very frequent, but it actually seems to be getting more and more common all the time. In the last few years, we’ve seen the site of a long ago family reunion reduced from a grassy, green wilderness to a makeshift dump, with fast food wrappers, ripped garbage bags and even a mattress rusting and rotting into the ground. Last year, my Mother and I took a walk of maybe a mile on a quiet country road and came back with three or four bags overflowing with trash we’d picked out of the ditches. We stopped at that much because that’s all we could carry at once. We had to leave way too much behind. Even when I go for a little walk in the nearby corner park for some fresh air and to, perhaps, spot a chickadee or rabbit, I am greeted with the sight of uncountable cigarette butts and packages, plastic bags, candy bar wrappers and whatever else folks just feel like they don’t need any more and can’t be bothered to take to the trash can.
So where is this attitude coming from? One evening as my father and I left the mall, a man and his small child walked a few strides ahead of us. The kid was slurping away on some sort of soft drink.
“Hurry up and throw it away!” The father admonished, and the kid turned around and chucked the cup and straw onto the ground, splashing my father’s slacks with pop. The man hurriedly apologized for the splashing, and they rushed off. No remorse for encouraging a little child to throw her trash down wherever she happened to be standing.
Not that all parents are coaching their children to be litterbugs of course. But something’s going on.
Now, I can stand by that country slough all day staring at that beer bottle, criticizing others and shaking my head sadly, but every day I find myself asking an even bigger and harder question:
What have I done today to make it better?
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