The secret to cleaning up our parks
In a conversation with new Undersecretary of the Interior
David Bernhardt, I touched on a subject that U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had brought up: Cleaning up America’s national parks is a No. 1 mission.
“I know how to eliminate litter at national parks,” I told him.
“How? How?” Bernhardt responded, animated.
It would make for a column, I figured, and Bernhardt then asked me to send him the details. In turn, a week later,
Heather Swift, Zinke’s press secretary, followed up with the same request regarding the mission: How to eradicate litter at national parks.
From Yosemite Valley to the beaches at Lake Tahoe, from Dolores Park in San Francisco to Vista Point on the Peninsula Skyline, the sense of urgency has reached Defcon 1 to take on litter at our parks and recreation areas.
At Yosemite National Park, from Wednesday through Sunday, volunteers are operating “Yosemite Facelift.” Last year volunteers spent 11,700 hours picking up 12,197 pounds of trash, said Jamie Richards at park headquarters.
At Lake Tahoe, after Fourth of July this summer, more than 300 volunteers picked up nearly 1,700 pounds of trash from only six beaches, according to The League to Save Lake Tahoe. That included more than 5,000 cigarette butts.
At Dolores Park, after a good weather weekend this past April, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department estimated it took 44 hours of labor to pick up enough trash to fill 460 trash bags.
At Vista Point on Skyline, people often park for a few minutes to take in the view below of the foothills and Felt Lake, Stanford and Hoover Tower and beyond across the South Bay to Mount Hamilton. If you look down along the curb of the parking area, you’ll see cigarette butts from end to end. Unless someone picks them up, they don’t go away.
The Interior’s collective yearning to take on littering could create a template that could be effective for park districts across America, California and in San Francisco. The Interior manages the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management, all of which provide access to public lands, and with it, what’s become an inevitable litter problem.
The last time national parks were near litter-free was in the mid 1980s, when President Reagan appointed Bill Mott of Orinda, the former superintendent of the East Bay Regional Park District and director of California State Parks, to run the National Park Service. Mott took me under his wing, worked with me on some stories and showed me how a clear directive with a verifiable goal can make for results.
In Yosemite Valley one morning in 1987, I remember when Mott, while talking to a circle of rangers, broke off to pick up a stray piece of litter. He held it up to the rangers and then said, “See what I just did? I want every employee in the park to pick up at least one piece of litter every day. If a visitor sees you do it, then talk to them, tell them what we’re doing. Pretty soon everybody will join in. All the litter will get picked up.”
Guess what? It worked. That moment was the start. By fall, instead of having to round up volunteers to pick up 12,000 pounds of trash in Yosemite, like through this weekend, the park was already clean. Somehow, in the past 30 years, Mott’s legacy has been lost.
With a few tweaks, that program could be re-established along with other strategies: At entrance kiosks: Yosemite had 5 million visitors last year, and at park entry points, each visitor passes by a kiosk and talks to a park specialist before entering the park; nationally in 2015, there were 305 million visits. At first contact, the attendant would be required to tell each visitor: “Please join us in keeping the park clean. We ask you to pick up at least one piece of litter each day for your visit.” This goes to Mott’s first rule: “Ask for what you want from people who can provide it.” Free trash bags: Many parks in the Bay Area provide lowcost doggy bags for waste pickup. Parks could do the same, that is, with small bags for litter and provide them at entry points. Many already keep a trash bag with them at all times in their vehicles, their boats, daypacks and backpacks. Make sure everyone has one. The cigarette solution: Only 17 percent of the American public smokes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet you can spot cigarette butts almost anyplace. The instant solution is to ban cigarettes with filters in parks and limit smoking to specified sites. Get caught with a cigarette with a filter and rangers then eject you from the park. Logo: Post no-litter logos where appropriate, so visitors get the repeated message. In the Bay Area, this is how Save The Bay helped stop people from dumping in storm drains, with painted messages on the curbs, “Dump No Waste, Drains to Bay.” It works. Brochure/newspaper: As new publications are developed as handouts at park entry points and visitor centers, the logo and repeated no litter/pickup litter messages would appear on the cover of each. No new material and potential litter would need to be created. Repeated messages get remembered.
Billboards/trailheads: The logo and repeated no litter/pickup litter message would be posted at every public information board and trash can.
Employee pick-up: The National Park Service alone has 22,000 employees. Each one, as a template for every park, anywhere, would be required to pick up at least one piece of litter each day, just as Mott started 30 years ago. As Mott said, this becomes a symbol that no one, starting with the national parks director, accepts litter, and that “We’re in this together to get rid of it.”
Crackdown: It’s a privilege to visit a park and anyone who violates that privilege should be cited with a $1,000 fine, just as the law prescribes, and in turn, rangers then eject them from the park. In Yosemite, I’ve seen rangers spend two days escorting hikers with dogs (illegal on the trail) from wilderness to the park boundary. The story gets out and everybody obeys the laws.
Some say you can’t fix stupid. Others point out that rangers and enforcement seem reluctant to take on littering. That can change. After first contact with visitors at park entry points, follow-up reinforcement with repeated messaging, free trash bags, a ban on filtered cigarettes and an employee pick-up program. Rangers would then finally have the backing to fight a war that can be won.