Earth Day is a good day to start a regular habit

Earth Day 2023 is coming up on Saturday. We ran a story in the Wednesday paper about the events being planned by the City of Lancaster, to celebrate the day. They include a cleanup day scheduled for April 29, a coloring contest and a lawnmower exchange program, and on Earth Day, free rides will be offered to the California Poppy Festival at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds, thanks to a partnership between the city, AVTA and Metrolink.

Though Earth Day is a great time to clean up around your home and neighborhood, it’s something we should think about every day.

If more of us were conscious about keeping our community clean, we would not be subjected to the trash in parking lots and along the freeway that is visible whenever we go out — not to mention the household goods and furniture that get dumped in the desert and in empty lots located in neighborhoods.

All manner of trash can be found on neighborhood sidewalks and on the sides of the road; everything from plastic bottles and broken glass to empty chip bags and even hypodermic needles. It’s important to exercise caution when the latter is seen — especially if they are uncapped. It would be way too easy for a child or a pet to get stuck with one of those.

We can’t stop others from littering because some people just don’t care. They will toss their trash out the window as they are driving down the street, instead of properly disposing of it once they get near a trash can. Cigarette butts are one of the items frequently tossed from moving vehicles.

When the pandemic first began nearly three years ago, rubber gloves and masks littered many parking lots across the AV. That was in addition to the regular trash that people already tossed out. It was disgusting — and still is.

Cleaning up our neighborhoods is just one step to making the AV a better place to live. No, we can’t ensure that everyone will do the same — it would be nice if they would. But we can start by changing our own behavior and ensuring that we don’t litter and we pick up the garbage around our own dwelling.

So if Earth Day is the day we begin to make that change, then so be it; but it’s something we should do throughout the year, not just on April 22.