Editorial Notebook: What are people thinking when trashing our rivers?
Pia Lopez
Sacramento Bee
07/02/2010
I was a kid in the 1960s and grew up having certain lessons drummed into me, such as "Every Litter Bit Hurts" and "Don't be a Litterbug."
I recall one day going down to the creek in the local woods with my cousin Molly, each with a big trash bag in hand, intending to clean up the area. Our bags were full in 10 minutes and we gave up. Our small part was too small to make anything but a dent.
I always cringed when I saw someone throw a soda can or cigarette butt out a car window.
So I found myself cringing the other day as I biked 11 miles south from the Tower Bridge through the Pocket to the new water intake facility (set to open in August).
Not far from Tower Bridge, I could look over the wall on the River Promenade and see bottles, cans and paper trash. On the levee past Garcia Bend, I could see bottles next to the trail and boxes of trash on the riverbank.
At the entrance to the levee trail at Riverside Avenue, there were giant bags of abandoned trash.
All along the riverfront, people walked back to cars without their trash, which they had dumped who knows where. Perhaps they thought someone else would pick up after them? These are people who likely wouldn't litter in their own neighborhood. Yet along the river? Perhaps they though it was "someone else's problem."
Littering is both an eyesore and a threat to wildlife. The problem is so immense that one individual trying to set an example by not littering, or by carrying a litterbag to clean up after others, will do very little. The scale of the trashing is appalling.
We need a high-profile campaign, just as in the 1960s, to rekindle an ethos of beauty and responsibility. This shouldn't be about laws and enforcement: City and county ordinances and state law already make littering illegal but rely on rangers actually catching a person in the act of strewing trash.
