How we treat everything
I've started picking up cans. I was walking down the street where we lived last month, and what felt like every 5 steps, I’d see another shiny cylinder tossed to its fate. My mind devoured them as I walked, “How had I not noticed these before?” Weeks afterwards, I couldn’t shake this weird responsibility of the enormity of cans lying on that road, and I internally promised I would return to gather them.
I've wrestled with picking up litter often. Feeling guilty as I carry on unflinching past a dishevelled wrapper splayed across my path. I tell myself, “It’s ok, there’ll be another chance, I'll get the next one.” But quickly given a fresh opportunity, I’d disregard that one too. With every excuse under the sun, I continue with all that's important, feeling the gap widen between the person I want to be and the person I am in action.
As I processed the bottomless opportunities to simply bend over rubbish, I felt overwhelmed. “How could one commit to cleaning up every piece? That’s ridiculous, I can’t spend every hour of the day attending to each shiny garbage I see.” But my heart still needed a moral code, a compromise. Instead of doing nothing, I decided, “If I am in a place I am enjoying, I will pick up the litter in front of me.”
Seeing a wrapper on a hike in the middle of nowhere is like crossing paths with someone in a small country town. You can't ignore the fact that they’re walking towards you, increasing proximity, hand raised, ready to tip their hat; you have to acknowledge their presence and respond. But when you walk somewhere crawling with bottles and wrappers, the feeling compares more to passing strangers in the city, it's easy to avoid eye contact, the sheer enormity of strangers passing automatically releases us from our duty of a passing nod or hello. And we choose to ignore others because if we committed to greeting everyone we passed, we’d be recovering at home each day with a sore neck and cheek muscles from continual pleasant smiling. Perhaps that is how we also feel towards confetti-littered places, we switch off seeing individuals when we are surrounded.
My partner and I holidayed in Indonesia in 2023, and we witnessed incredible natural spaces intruded on by plastic. We snorkelled in a plastic ocean next to the fish. Like shells on a beach, rubbish was washed up as far as the eye could see. And every waterway and little creek we rode by on our scooter was jam-packed. For the locals, dumping their rubbish in the ocean, road sides and waterways was the norm. As far as I could see, they didn't have big dump trucks doing the rounds, so options were burn it or ditch it, literally. Who can judge them? Where I live, we have garbage trucks and scattered public bins, but the view looks pretty trashy from where I stand too.
I saw the movie Pangolin recently. Pangolins are these old soul African animals, dwindling in number from being hunted for Chinese medicine. One of the women interviewed in the documentary said something that moved me. Along the lines of, “If these incredible animals go extinct, it is a representation of how we treat everything.”
I finally returned to the road I used to live on with a garbage bag. Broken up over a couple of days, I walked up and down the 2km road and gathered 183 cans. With 4 hours spread over a couple of weeks, wandering down surrounding streets, the total rounded to 268 across 7km. Sharing these totals arn’t to brag or ask for a medal. Others have gone before and heroically pulled tons and tons of rubbish out of oceans and so on. When I pick recyclable bottles and cans up, I don't feel pride, I feel solemn, I've stopped feeling overwhelmed by the limitless and recurring trash, but spurred to action and humbled by the words, “This is how we treat everything.”