[at-l] LITTER

[spiriteagle99 at hotmail.com (Jim and/or Ginny Owen)]

Robert wrote:

>I honestly can't believe that I'm being made fun of for trying to keep my 
>town clean and possibly suggest that everyone try a little harder to keep 
>their neck of the woods clean.

Believe it.  But don't pay attention to it.

A year or so ago, I ran across the results of a study that was done re: 
neighborhoods.  The details are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, they 
started with pristine middle-class neighborhoods. After some time of 
monitoring litter levels, they one day (deliberately) broke a car window - 
and left the car on the street.  Within a couple days, the car was stripped 
and the street was littered.  The one broken car window gave "permission" to 
other people to be slobs.

OTOH - they also started the "opposite" experiment - by going into a 
neighborhood that had previously been trashed and they involved the 
residents in cleaning it up.  And it stayed clean.  The cleanup  gave the 
residents pride - and they kept it clean.

The experiments were run in different neighborhoods on both the East and 
West Coasts.  And the results were consistently the same.

People are slobs when they're given "permission" to be so.  When they're 
given reason to have pride in themselves, their neighborhood, and their 
lives - then they clean up their act.   And their neighborhood.

There ARE natural born slobs out there.  But even they can be restrained by 
social pressure.  Anyone who's been to the Canadian Rockies has found very 
little litter there.  In fact, in two weeks there, we saw only one example 
of roadkill - and not a siingle Bud Lite can.  It's clean - and even with 
the tens of thousands of tourons - it stays that way.

As a "bad example" - try New Mexico - specifically, the Carson National 
Forest, which is littered from one end to the other with beer cans.  I have 
several hundred pictures of beer cans and other litter in New Mexico but we 
didn't put those on the website with our CDT journal - it was too 
depressing.  We'll see if it's improved when we go back there next April.  
OTOH - those pictures were the catalyst for the Budwieser "Be Responsible" 
campaign that they've been running for the last several years.  But I still 
won't drink Bud - of any sort.

Keep up the good work -

Walk softly,
Jim


http://www.spiriteaglehome.com/