I live in Queens, in a neighborhood that’s bisected by the Grand Central Parkway.
Along the side of the highway, there’s a buffer zone: a strip of land between the highway guardrails and the residential neighborhood on the other side, enclosed by chain-link fencing. In that no-man’s-land, spindly trees grow and weedy undergrowth proliferates. It’s an interstitial space, off-limits to humans and cars, too small for any animal bigger than a squirrel.
In the undergrowth, there are mounds of litter. I notice it every time I walk past. It’s rubbish of all kinds, the detritus of civilization: plastic shopping bags, twisted and crumpled like deflated jellyfish; shiny chip bags, fast food cartons and stained paper wrappers; aluminum cans, soda bottles and drink cups; faded newspapers and fliers, signs from long-gone political campaigns.
Most of the trash is plastic, a grim testament to humanity’s lasting influence on the planet. We’ve littered the world so thoroughly with it, on some beaches people have discovered “plastiglomerate“—sand, rock and shells in a matrix of fused and compressed plastic.
Where it’s heaped against the fence, there are distinct strata, as the old stuff is slowly buried beneath leaf litter and newer trash. It makes me think of archaeology, of how ancient cities slowly sink into the earth, and how scientists of today learn about people of the past by studying the detritus they left behind.
Who does this, I wonder? Who would be so lazy and careless that they think nothing of tossing trash out the window of their car as they speed by? There’s so much litter there, countless people must have made the same decision over months or years. It seems unfathomable to me.
But then it occurred to me: I’m part of the problem too. After all, how many times have I walked by that spot and never picked anything up?
I can protest my innocence. I didn’t put the trash there. But in my own way, aren’t I just as oblivious? I could pick something up every time I pass by—it wouldn’t cost me anything—but I usually don’t.
The first step
As I’ve said many times, morality is a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The essence of morality is the choices that are selfishly advantageous, but that become collectively destructive if everyone thinks the same way.
Littering is a paradigm example. It’s just that little bit easier to toss your trash out the window and forget about it, rather than carry it until you find somewhere to dispose of it. But if everyone does the same thing, our cities end up buried in garbage.
This mindset is insidious, because when no one else cares, it’s easy to justify why you shouldn’t either. How much good does it do to pick up one piece of litter, when the roadside is choked with it? When everyone else is determined to be wasteful and thoughtless, why should you be the sucker who cleans up their messes for them?
Littering may seem like a small thing, but this attitude scales to larger problems, too. Why be generous or compassionate, when everyone else is looking out for number one? Why be tolerant when others are hateful? Why be peaceful when everyone else is warlike?
Like a virus, this mindset spreads from one person to another. It serves as its own defense and justification, an endless corridor of mirrors.
There’s only one way out of this trap: Someone has to take the first step. Someone has to care, even if no one else does. Maybe it could be me. Maybe it could be you.
Back the way it was
I’ve been following Josh Donaldson, a.k.a, Earthdrop. He’s a family man from Scotland who’s become an unlikely social-media sensation on TikTok. He started with a simple mission: to clean up all the litter he finds in his country’s forests and streams.
It’s dispiriting to see just how much trash he hauls out of a beautiful green glade or a trickling brook. But after he’s finished, the forest seems healthier, rejuvenated. He even notes that when he comes back to a place after cleaning it up, he can often spot wildlife that wasn’t there before.
After I’ve watched one of his videos, I feel better too. It’s a peaceful feeling, as if you can breathe a little deeper, take in a little more air. And other people seem to agree. He’s accumulated over a million followers, just by picking up litter in the woods.
Until now, this has just been a quixotic hobby of his. Now he’s trying to make it his full-time job, with a dedicated recycling center, although it requires fundraising on a scale he’s long been reluctant to attempt.
I’m all for that. I want to live in a world where more people can do this for a living. We spend enough time and energy—too much—inventing new things to buy and sell to each other, things to use up and throw away. We spend too much time thinking about what we can get our hands on next, and not enough thinking about what we leave behind.
I want to live in a world where we spend less of ourselves on acquisition and consumption, and more on mending the hubris and wastefulness of the past. I want more people who treat it as a calling to clean up the damage and detritus of capitalism and put the planet back the way it was.
The Ocean Cleanup, or the nascent efforts to pull anthropogenic carbon out of the atmosphere, are encouraging efforts in this direction. They may be inadequate, compared to the scale of the problem. But however huge the task, we have to start somewhere.
If we’re ever going to repair the damage we’ve done, we’ll clean it up the same way we littered it in the first place: one piece at a time. It’s worth contemplating, the next time you see trash by the roadside.