Trash talk doesn’t go far enough
ANorthern Southland farmer padlocks the gate to prevent public access to a popular swimming hole after finding soiled nappies in grass on the riverbank. It’s an act of revulsion.
Two Invercargill girls find a used syringe, needle attached, blood-coloured liquid inside, discarded at the Appleby cricket grounds. A community shudders at the thought of such an indefensibly irresponsible, criminally dangerous act.
The culprit really needs help but for most of us, surely, the more immediate, vivid, reaction is anger at the hideous disregard for the safety of others.
As we read such sour stories can we not hear, in the distance, that snappy and cheerful antilitter advertising slogan currently afoot: ‘‘That’s the way we DO things around here . . .’’
A couple of unedifying examples like these hardly subvert an entire campaign. But they do serve as a reminder that we should be motivated in the same direction by different forces: attracted by the potential of a cleaner country, and repelled by the squalor of the alternative.
Inevitably the cries for penalty and punishment arise, alongside lamentations about the few who spoil it for the rest.
Yes, there needs to be pointy reckoning for litter offenders, and not just the most outrageously dangerous or distasteful ones.
But then comes the sometimes literally sticky question of how we pick up after ourselves, collectively.
How we react to the piece of litter lying before us when the blame for it being there is not ours. Are we still blameless when we leave it there? Sometimes, sure.
It is a tad unworldly to expect that every single journey we take is to be interrupted every single time there’s something at our feet that shouldn’t be.
Truth to tell, however, most of us can tell the difference between an item that can in good conscience be overlooked in passing – for instance if it posed no sanitary risk, there was no nearby repository for us to put it – and something that could with scant effort, risk or delay, be scooped up and put where it belongs.
In this respect the present campaign makes the hardly daunting encouragement to pick up a piece of litter a day, every day. Fair enough, surely.
There’s perhaps a temptation to excuse ourselves on the basis this would be an unfair expectation on us and distraction from the real need to dissuade those who litter.
It’s unassailably true we need collective and consequential actions from regulatory authorities, educators and focused community initiatives.
Major tasks present themselves, from the abandonment, now upon us, of single-use supermarket plastic bags to confronting the shameful and still inadequately addressed problem of making sure supposedly recycled material ends up in destinations and uses worthy of that description.
But on the up-close-andpersonal scale, passers-by who too easily shrug off their own little inactions as inconsequential are in some ways thinking no differently from the litterbugs who tell themselves their carelessness is no big deal in the scheme of things either.
These are big calls because they’re habit forming. They represent a mindset, one that’s been getting us in trouble.
Passers-by who too easily shrug off their own little inactions as inconsequential are in some ways thinking no differently from the litterbugs who tell themselves their carelessness is no big deal . . .