Litter, Litter Everywhere!

 Is it just me, or is our litter problem getting worse? I live on a country road in Maryland, and every day there are more plastic bottles, McDonald’s sacks, beer cans, paper napkins, and Big Gulp containers than the day before.

One of the many ways that plastic trash can affect the health and growth of
wildlife. Photo by Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK CC BY 2.0

Not only is the litter unsightly, it harms wildlife. One of the reasons animals get hit by cars is that they are attracted to roadsides and medians by the delicious smells of our litter. The last couple of times I’ve gone up Interstate 81, a 60- or- so-mile stretch from Hagerstown, MD, to Harrisburg, PA, I’ve noted ten or more dead birds of prey along the median - an alarmingly high number for that amount of space! The median is covered with litter, which no doubt attracts mice, which no doubt attract red-tailed hawks, which are no match for the steady stream of 18-wheelers going down the road at 65 miles per hour.

Food trash on the side of an Arkansas highway

I keep thinking about four possible explanations for all this litter. First, we are eating more and more crap from fast food restaurants and gas stations, which require plastic forks, plates, and cups, and paper napkins. We buy this unhealthy stuff, eat it in our cars, and then pitch it out the window. It makes me sad to think that most of the litter is from completely unnecessary purchases of so-called food that, for health reasons, we shouldn’t be consuming in the first place - and that we’re consuming our meals in our cars instead of at home with our families.

Second, in some places, local governments are providing fewer services, including trash collection. In our rural area, we have to pay for both trash collection and recycling, and they are expensive. Some of our neighbors choose to pay a smaller fee and haul their own trash to the dump. And some people choose to throw their trash on the side of the road: big kitchen garbage bags full of waste, television sets, tires, and all kinds of other things that cost big money to get rid of.

Third, I wonder if the increasing litter is a sign of Americans’ decreasing interest in the social contract. We don’t trust our government, we don’t like our neighbors, we feel this country isn’t giving us enough, and so we don’t mind junking up the roadways, even in our own neighborhoods. Think I’m making this up? I was talking to someone just the other day who said he never used to litter but now he does. His explanation? “I hate this #%!*ing state!”

Finally, I can’t help but think that the litter problem is related to our attenuated relationship with nature. Important books have been written in recent years about how we are spending less time in nature and how that harms us physically, emotionally, and psychologically - especially children. Perhaps people do not appreciate nature as a rich setting that we share with trees and animals and insects and depend on for clean air and water; perhaps instead people see it as empty space, a wasteland that may as well be trashed as not.

What do you think?

Unnatural Nature

What is “nature?”

Recently I’ve been noticing that some of my favorite nature spots are not sprawling wilderness. They are sites with a history of heavy human activity. When I was in my hometown of Nashville, Arkansas, recently, I walked most days on the “nature trail” at the City Park. It is a beautiful half-mile trail that meanders through an overgrown pecan grove, by a lazy creek, and past an old cow pasture. The land was a farm once, and the landowner donated the land to the park. There are places along the asphalt trail to stop and read signs about how to look for and appreciate nature, even among the carefully planted rows of pecan trees.

Closer to home, I love to walk on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I work. There is no place around here more serene, at least outside of tourist season. There are pastures, woods, a creek, and small, picturesque hills. I never fail to see a myriad of birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and sometimes deer. But these trails are part of a so-called commemorative landscape covered with monuments to Union and Confederate units. The ground is soaked in the blood of tens of thousands of soldiers who died in a brutal three-day battle. And, if you'll notice in the photo, there are plenty of con trails in the clear blue skies overhead.

"Flower in a Sidewalk Crack", by Fuzzy Gerdes (unaltered), CC BY 2.0

If these two places qualify as “nature,” then what about the garden in my backyard? And if that qualifies, what about potted garden plants on an urban balcony? Or the tuft of grass that sticks out of an urban sidewalk crack and provides cover for the occasional beetle? Or a zoo full of wildlife?

Google provides the following definition of nature: “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.” Hmm. That definition disqualifies all of the above, which are human creations - or, perhaps, places where the physical world struggles to exist in spite of human interference.

Earthlights 1994-95, captured by NASA

Every geological epoch is given a name to reflect the major occurrences of that period. Although the international bodies that decide these things have not approved it, the current age has been unofficially named the Anthropocene to convey the great impact that humans have had on the earth since our existence. When you think about it, there is hardly any aspect or location of nature that has not been impacted by humans. We have changed the soil, air, water, atmosphere, and seismic activity of this planet. We have changed the genetic structure of plants and animals. We have moved into almost every territory. A CNN travel article online, entitled “10 of the World’s Last Great Wilderness Areas,” includes hotel recommendations for each of them!

So does that mean the whole planet can no longer be considered “nature?” Of course not.

I like that we call the unnatural “nature.” It reminds me that nature is all around us and that we are part of nature as well. It shows me that we don’t have to go to great pains to go out into nature; instead we can begin to appreciate nature as it exists around us. It suggests to me that the kind of human-nature integration that we think only occurred in the past, or is now only accessible to indigenous peoples and hermits, can be ours, too, if we simply decide to slow down and pay attention to what is all around us.

Nuisance Human Beings

I went to a wonderful talk last week on “Wildlife Encounters” given by an employee for a state wildlife agency. His office is one that deals with “nuisance” animals. They include deer, bear, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bats, snakes, and woodpeckers, as well as others. There are several reasons they become “nuisances” for human beings. They come into a yard, scare people, and harm or eat pets. They eat garden plants and landscaping. They hole up in attics and poop everywhere. They drill holes in homes to dig out insects. They run across roads and cause us to hit them with our cars. They cost us money in insurance claims and extermination fees.

But there is another way of looking at the issue. In most cases, it seems, we create the problem. Animals such as bears and raccoons would not normally want to come so close to houses and yards because they consider humans a threat. But they do so when we provide ready food sources, such as garbage piled in the yard or by the street. The speaker pointed out that almost all bear sightings near houses occur in the early spring, when bears are coming out of hibernation and hungry; they fall off in early summer, when natural food sources for bears are in ready supply. The most successful bear-avoidance strategy is removing garbage from open places, such as placing garbage outside on the morning it will be picked up rather than letting it sit there for days at a time.

Deer would not normally take the risk of spending time eating backyard gardens if they were not hungry because of overcrowding. In many places around the mid-Atlantic where I live, there are four or five times the number of deer per acre than the “carrying capacity” of the land will allow; that makes for a lot of hungry deer behaving in ways that are not natural to them (including eating backyard gardens and even eating baby birds in the nest). Overcrowding of deer leads to diseases that affect humans, such as Lyme Disease. [On a side note, because I’m also a grammar and punctuation freak, please note that it is simply “Lyme” Disease, no s or ‘s at the end!] The most successful means of treating the problem of deer overpopulation is hunting them, and unfortunately lots of well-meaning people actively oppose hunting or seek to over-regulate it.

I asked the speaker if his agency ever has a seat at the table in discussions of new housing developments, and of course the answer was no. Development is rampant in my area, swallowing up woods and pastures in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. We’re crowding wildlife into smaller and smaller wilderness areas and then considering them “nuisances” when they come onto our property. The speaker explained that, once an animal has become habituated to humans and human neighborhoods, there is no going back. Moving a “nuisance” bear to another part of the woods doesn’t work; studies of tagged bears show that such bears will continue to seek out humans and grow bolder and bolder about approaching homes, campsites, and cars. Thus the slogan “A fed bear is a dead bear.” State wildlife agencies, and the animal removal agencies with which they contract, generally no longer catch and release. A “nuisance” animal that is trapped will be euthanized. A very sad end to this particular story of the relationship between humans and nature.

What would happen if we started to see ourselves as “nuisance” humans? What if we thought a bit about the world from the point of view of wildlife and then acted accordingly: stopped putting pet food and garbage outside, considered deer movement flows and put up fencing accordingly to keep them out of our gardens, watched to see how squirrels and bats were getting into our attics and then simply filled those holes, drove a little more slowly and carefully during the deer rut, and so forth? What if we planned development a little more carefully, to decrease the amount of land fragmentation that resulted, or to allow some habitat to remain in large developments so that animals were less likely to come into our yards looking for food and shelter? What if we accepted well-planned hunting as a necessary solution to an unnatural problem? And what if we stopped letting our fears of animals get the best of us? As always with nature, how we perceive it affects how we act. The question is: can we change our perception?