Litter Pick-Up Angst
As a budding young environmentalist, I organized regular "litter pick-ups" of my local stream, dragging along my little brother and often a couple neighborhood kids. Toward the end of the 6 months we spent in England during my father's sabbatical, I turned ten, and the main activity of the party was a neighborhood litter pick-up. My friends thought Americans had very strange ideas about birthdays.
So I have felt rather guilty that until today I had not managed to make it to a single neighborhood-association clean-up walk since we moved here. I think Robin made one, and he's been putting me to shame about making a habit of grabbing trash whenever we're walking anywhere.
But having a kid suddenly makes 9am on a Saturday not so unreasonable, so I headed out yesterday and put in a good hour (with an interruption in the middle for a yard sale).
I'm glad I did, but it was also uncomfortable. The dominant narrative of what we were doing amounted to "saving our neighborhood" (a direct quote), fighting back against horrible trash-strewing people ("some people are just slobs") who were going to drag us all down the drain with them if we let them. One of the organizers, who also brought out brooms to sweep people's sidewalks (?!), took to muttering about code violations at one point, when all I could see was an (admittedly very frustrating) side yard where someone had mowed over a moderate amount of trash.
Now, I am not above head-shaking at the number of people who don't seem aware that the ground is not where trash goes, and I try to be obsessive about picking up whatever blows onto my lawn. (An awful lot of our litter comes from lackadaisical garbage-can emptying by the city.)
And it is true that really serious levels of litter (approaching dumping) can be one of the causes/signs that a neighborhood is in trouble. But our neighborhood is *so* not there. It does need saving from time to time, but from bad development proposals mostly. (The neighborhood association has been invaluable in organizing against those.)
Still, being in the company of a mostly white, mostly well-off group talking about the problems caused by "some people" puts me on edge. It's so easy to shift from talking about bad behaviors to talking about bad people. It seems to be an occupational hazard of neighborhood activists, especially in mixed-income neighborhoods like ours.
More broadly, I get the feeling that in many people's vision of a healthy, stable neighborhood, we wouldn't have to do neighborhood clean-ups at all. I don't feel that way. Cities are chaotic and uncontrollable and sometimes messy. In my ideal world there wouldn't be very much to clean up, and everyone would take turns pitching in to do it. But I fear the kinds of places that manage to stay clean all the time.
So I have felt rather guilty that until today I had not managed to make it to a single neighborhood-association clean-up walk since we moved here. I think Robin made one, and he's been putting me to shame about making a habit of grabbing trash whenever we're walking anywhere.
But having a kid suddenly makes 9am on a Saturday not so unreasonable, so I headed out yesterday and put in a good hour (with an interruption in the middle for a yard sale).
I'm glad I did, but it was also uncomfortable. The dominant narrative of what we were doing amounted to "saving our neighborhood" (a direct quote), fighting back against horrible trash-strewing people ("some people are just slobs") who were going to drag us all down the drain with them if we let them. One of the organizers, who also brought out brooms to sweep people's sidewalks (?!), took to muttering about code violations at one point, when all I could see was an (admittedly very frustrating) side yard where someone had mowed over a moderate amount of trash.
Now, I am not above head-shaking at the number of people who don't seem aware that the ground is not where trash goes, and I try to be obsessive about picking up whatever blows onto my lawn. (An awful lot of our litter comes from lackadaisical garbage-can emptying by the city.)
And it is true that really serious levels of litter (approaching dumping) can be one of the causes/signs that a neighborhood is in trouble. But our neighborhood is *so* not there. It does need saving from time to time, but from bad development proposals mostly. (The neighborhood association has been invaluable in organizing against those.)
Still, being in the company of a mostly white, mostly well-off group talking about the problems caused by "some people" puts me on edge. It's so easy to shift from talking about bad behaviors to talking about bad people. It seems to be an occupational hazard of neighborhood activists, especially in mixed-income neighborhoods like ours.
More broadly, I get the feeling that in many people's vision of a healthy, stable neighborhood, we wouldn't have to do neighborhood clean-ups at all. I don't feel that way. Cities are chaotic and uncontrollable and sometimes messy. In my ideal world there wouldn't be very much to clean up, and everyone would take turns pitching in to do it. But I fear the kinds of places that manage to stay clean all the time.