Spring weather brings with it the unwelcome bloom of roadside litter. Colorful cans, bottles, and wrappers sprout from the melting snow every year at this time.
Litter is not only unsightly. There’s also evidence that it contributes to environmental degradation. The plastics you toss out the car window can make their way to our rivers, lakes, and oceans. There, they can entrap or be consumed by fish and other sea animals. Tiny bits of plastic have become a permanent component of underwater sediment and beach sand.
Back on land, open containers and discarded tires fill with rainwater and become incubators for the mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus and other diseases. And the half-eaten burger and fries you tossed out from your last fast-food binge? Your leftovers can attract undesirable vermin to our neighborhoods.
Roadside trash also reveals an apathy that is discouraging to those tackling larger environmental problems: if we can’t even keep our neighborhoods clean, how can we summon the urgency to address air and water pollution, habitat loss, climate change, and the other big environmental issues? It’s not just the litterers who are the problem; it’s also those of us who walk or drive by and ignore the trash.
So grab a trash bag and head to the nearest littered roadside, parking lot, or beach, and do your bit to start cleaning up. Maybe if our neighborhoods and natural areas stop looking like dumps, people will stop treating them that way.
Web Links
Polymers are Forever
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270/
Photo, taken on August 5, 2009, courtesy of Levi Webb via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, with partial support from the Field Day Foundation.