On one of those Michigan perfect blue-sky days several years back, I was in my kayak on a Fenton lake. Letting my paddle go still for a few moments, I drew in a deep breath and decided to take in the beauty of the day. It was breathtaking – that is, until I glanced slightly to my right out of the corner of my eye and caught a white flash. Turning to see what it was, I was horrified to discover a used diaper floating in the water amongst the lily pads.
I would love to say the diaper was the only litter I have seen during my kayaking junkets. Empty pop bottles and cans, plastic bags, random shoes; you name it, I have seen it floating in various bodies of water.
When I was a kid, littering was on a par with swearing. If I did it in front of my dad, there would be hell to pay. To be on the safe side, I just didn’t do it, whether dad was around or not. Okay, well, I did swear. But littering? That did not happen. My dad simply asked me “what would happen if everyone threw a candy wrapper or some other trash out of the car window?” I asked him “who would clean it up?” He answered flatly, “No one.”
Back then, environmentalist marketing campaigns were not what they are today. When I was a kid, we had Keep America Beautiful®, featuring the occasional public service announcement on TV reminding us to “give a hoot and don’t pollute.” That anti-littering campaign started back in 1953, when my dad was a kid. Now, 71 years later, we have Keep America Beautiful Month every April and Earth Day every April 22. We even have laws against littering. There is messaging on every conceivable media platform about the dangers littering presents to wildlife and the environment.
People are still doing it.
The Keep America Beautiful campaign had a name for people who litter. But if you call someone a “litterbug” today, it doesn’t seem to have the same sting that it did back when I was in elementary school.
So how do we get people to stop?
It is easy to believe that people who callously litter simply have not seen enough of the beauty in the world to appreciate it. I don’t think that is true. Even as my husband and I hiked through Yellowstone National Park a couple of years ago, we ran across the occasional discarded water bottle or Power Bar wrapper. I guess that means people who litter simply don’t care.
People who don’t care scare me because they are nearly impossible to reach. At a previous employer, my co-workers used to stack their dirty dishes in the lunchroom sink, right underneath a sign that read, “If your mother usually cleans up after you, bring her with you.”
Shaming, name-calling, showing images of helpless animals with litter wrapped around their necks – none of that seems to be working. But even with 50 billion pieces of litter along U.S. roadways and waterways, littering is down 54 percent over the last decade, according to Keep America Beautiful.
Today, “giving a hoot” is about more than not littering – it’s about doing what it takes to clear away the wreckage, even if that means cleaning up someone else’s mess. To learn more about how you can help, visit the Keep America Beautiful site KAB.org/Individual-Action.
