Sustainable Living by Shawn Dell Joyce

As the last snow melts, and first tender shoots work their way up through the dark soil, we humans cannot help but see our handiwork everywhere we look: litter!

Spring showers wash it into our lawns, collect it in the gutters by the roads and consolidate it on storm drains. With no leaves as camouflage, we see the plastic bags caught on bare branches. Beer bottles, tin cans and Styrofoam cups nestle like Easter eggs under shrubs and bushes. Litter is a manmade blight on the American landscape.

But litter doesn't stop there. In his jaw-dropping book, "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman describes a small continent of litter floating in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. His words: "It was not unlike an Arctic vessel pushing through chunks of brash ice, except what was bobbing around them was a fright of cups, bottle caps, tangles of fish netting and monofilament line, bits of polystyrene packaging, six-pack rings, spent balloons, filmy scraps of sandwich wrap and limp plastic bags that defied counting."

What is the source of all this flotsam and jetsam? Capt. Charles Moore of Long Beach, Calif., is quoted in the book as concluding that "80 percent of the mid-ocean flotsam had been originally discarded on land. It blew off garbage trucks, out of landfills, spilled from railroad shipping containers, washed down storm drains, sailed down rivers, wafted on the wind and found its way to the widening gyre."

According to the Keep America Beautiful campaign: "People tend to litter because they feel no sense of personal ownership. In addition, even though areas such as parks and beaches are public property, people often believe that someone else like a park maintenance or highway worker will take responsibility to pick up litter that has accumulated over time."

Part of the mission of Keep America Beautiful is to engage people in cleaning up their community and feeling that they have a vested interest in their environment.

The organization points out that litter can also happen accidentally — as in overflowing garbage cans waiting for curbside collection. Or from trucks at construction sites that are not properly covered. Even from municipalities that don't offer litter cans and proper receptacles in public places.

Every year, Keep America Beautiful hosts the Great American Cleanup from March 1 to May 31. This is the nation's largest annual community improvement program, with 30,000 events in 15,000 communities. Last year, volunteers collected 200 million pounds of litter and debris; planted 4.6 million trees, flowers and bulbs; cleaned 178,000 miles or roads, streets and highways; and diverted more than 70.6 million plastic (PET) bottles and more than 2.2 million scrap tires from the waste stream.

What you can do to help?

— Want to organize a cleanup in your community? Go to www.kab.org to volunteer.

— Suffering from NDD (Nature Deficit Disorder)? Grab the kids and some empty buckets, and walk the banks of the nearest stream picking up litter. Be sure to separate recyclables from trash.

— At home: Keep a litter bag in the car, bungee cord your curbside garbage can closed, and carry a pocket ashtray if you smoke. Teach your children to be stewards of the earth.

— At work: Ask your boss to "adopt a road" and take responsibility for keeping it litter-free, or conduct a recycling drive at work to collect paper, usable clothes, tires and other goods that can be donated.

— In your community: Identify eyesores and organize civic groups to eliminate the litter, create a "trash fishing contest" to clean up the waterways. Take computer equipment, or deliver it to the transfer station.

Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Orange County, N.Y. You can contact her at Shawn@ShawnDellJoyce.com. To find out more about Shawn Dell Joyce and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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