Comment on The road they drove to dump this trash literally takes to the landfill
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day agoYou would fucking DIE if I took you back to 70s America. I truly love how offended people get by littering, I really do!
Trash was piled on the side of every road, especially highways. People just chunked their McDonald’s bag when they were done, no big deal.
I’ve hauled a couple hundred pounds of crap out the woods surrounding our hood. About gave me a stroke on the larger items. But I keep at it, and it seems to prevent the broken window effect. Hadn’t been out in 3-weeks, figured it would be awful. Nah. Only got a single grocery bag out, and half was my own beer cans! (I did drag an electric scooter out. Fuck me. Try that over 1/2 mile of deep sand.)
I worked on regular cleanups of a wetlands near my old apt and the bike path that ran by. We’d pull literally tons of crap out of there but over time it got less and less.
I remember the 70s-80s and the trash but that doesn’t excuse littering even less now.
So, are you finding that it stays cleaner? I don’t want it to be my imagination, but I seem to be making an impact. And the rare people who see my crawl out of those woods always see me with trash bags.
It’s private property, but I think of my self as the unofficial park ranger. Hopefully if anyone bitches I can point to my work. Also, I don’t want to lose the privilege of wandering around out there, figure if we don’t fuck it up, and in fact improve it, no one will complain.
It never stays pristine but the worst of it took decades to accumulate. We found over a dozen tires, a safe, a beaten up rowboat, tons of old clothes piled up at an old campsite and of course the every present cans and plastic bottles. We also worked on removing invasives. As time went on most of the trash was what got carried by the streams feeding it from drains. There was one time I found a car had been dumped off of the bike path and set on fire.
Thanks for cleaning things up. It is very satisfying if a bit frustrating too. It is one of the few things in life where the result is obvious and clearly positive. I’m always picking trash up on hikes. Maybe the owner of the land would be willing to assist you by providing a place you can deposit the bags of trash and they could truck it out weekly or so. We did something similar with the state (it was public land) and had a storage shed with tools a local business let us use.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I can’t tell if you’re minimizing the problem because you think it used to be worse. If so, that’s pretty uncool, unlike the cleanups which you’re doing. Those are cool.
shalafi@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I don’t think it used to be worse, it was way worse. I just find it amusing when people get bent over seeing someone toss trash out the window when it was a daily sight in the day.
By all means, keep up the outrage! How do you think we got so much better? Shout out to the crying Indian ad. I cannot overstate how impactful that was. We only had 3 or 4 TV stations so it was up in everyone’s grill, whole country. Can’t get a message out like that today, too many outlets to cover. :(
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah see it’s not obvious if you’re being sarcastic or not…