I have seen trash along the Appalachian Trail, on the streets of every city I've ever been on, on the sides of every highway, people have used their surroundings as a dump.
Soda and water bottles, candy wrappers, and fast food boxes wash up on every beach, microscopic shreds of plastic and rubber float up on remote South Sea islands and here on the Andaman Sea. Measurable amounts of manmade chemicals pollute the deepest sea and highest mountains. Some people seem to waking up -- some of my students created their own "Green TV" videos and animations; my favorite showed a penguin, a dolphin, and a man in a rowboat making their way across ever-rising seas as land disappears.
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| Tides wash garbage on to the beach |
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| Monkeys at beach, Langkawi |
. In a small city in Egypt where I once worked, I had no choice but to join the neighbors in throwing garbage bags into the small canal that fed the Nile. Every trip to the open markets meant more black plastic bags -- bags that were discarded on the street and hung from the trees. In front of the door of our apartment house, a broken toilet seat was just the most memorable of the items that had been discarded. Yes, Egypt still has its pyramids and tombs, but all around them, there are plastic bags and coke cans. My lingering impression: Egypt is being buried under black plastic bags.
Yesterday, I was humbled to be invited to visit three homes of single mothers and their children of Indian descent who live in extreme poverty, surrounded by trash. These are women who have almost no skills or resources, living in deteriorating shelters that hardly qualify as houses, unable to leave their situations because they have a number of children that depend on them. The first "house" was reached by crossing through swamp grasses cluttered with trash to a few rooms in a series of cinderblock structures built for workers at a rubber plantation. Behind a door locked with a screwdriver slipped thru a wire, there was a disabled boy hidden away. His sister was lovely, dark-eyed and very bright; his mother classically beautiful but filthy. There was something deeply still about her. The neighboring rooms were deserted and filled with moldering furniture and cardboard.
In a 'kampung' village, the local leader had recommended help for a single mother whose husband had left her. We crossed a yard strewn with trash when the door opened to reveal a sweet-faced girl (old enough that she should have been in school) and two cross-eyed but handsome 18-month old twin boys. Their mother too had the same stillness and reserve -- and a kind of regal quality -- as she accepted boxes of vegetables and eggs.
To reach the third house, we picked our way through a muddy path past houses built up on stilts. Around and under each house, there was garbage everywhere. We climbed a concrete step and entered a large space with a rolled vinyl floor. I took three steps and nearly went through. The floorboards were rotting away. The mother told us her baby had fallen through one day. We spent about 20 minutes there, my hosts from a local charity* there to discuss having repairs made. As we left, we discovered the tide had risen and there was water up to knee-level between us and the path. A truck tire, broken machinery, plastic bottles, and other unspeakable things floated by. We wobbled across a plank to dry land. Thanks to The Charity Club Langkawi for this eye-opening, heart-breaking experience: http://www.langkawicharity.com/ .
Maybe I'm oversensitive but my eyes go to the garbage every time. Two months ago, I went to one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen on the north shore of the Andaman Sea island of Langkawi in Malaysia. It was nearly deserted and immaculate -- except for the trash that the resident monkeys had dug out of the bins. A month ago, I went back at the end of a holiday weekend and it was filled with tourist families (many probably from Kuala Lumpur), including many women dressed head to toe in full black purdah (an odd sight for a Westerner to see on a beach). All around them were paper plates, plastic bottles, detritus of fruit and vegetables. The monkeys had a field day. The tide had washed up a line of broken glass, splintered wood, and plastic containers (see photographs with this article). I began to pick up garbage on the beach, motivated because there were so many that would cut the feet of the playing children. People eyed me but no one else was inspired to follow my example. Why couldn't families include cleanup as a routine part of their beach day? Why don't we all routinely plan to bring garbage bags to carry out trash when we go to a park?
From the windows of my condo apartment in Bangsaen, Thailand, where I lived last year, there was a 'million dollar view' looking out over several miles of curving beach from the eighth floor. A forested island floated in mists at the center of the view; at night a line of lights glimmered on the horizon -- cargo ships arriving from all over the world. Thousands of people visited each weekend to swim. About 100 yards out, a net was strung to protect the beach from the sludge that pours down the Chao Phraya river from Bangkok into the Gulf of Thailand. As the tide went out, an oil slick coated the shore, probably from the cargo ships. Children waded out to swim between plastic, aluminum, glass, cardboard and paper. I tried three times to swim but every time stepped on something -- a broken beer bottle, a rusted can, a sopping mess of a cardboard box -- and went back to swim in a pool.
But of all the shocking and sickening experiences of finding trash marring the environment, the strongest memory I have is of the campus of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. It was the weekend before the university's theatre season was about to start. As a returning graduate student (I had been there some 20 years before for graduate work, then ran several theatre companies myself), I felt it was a duty to to help make the theatre look presentable. I walked around the building and within half an hour collected a pair of man's underwear, a full large garbage bag of recyclables, and used tampons and condoms. The campus where I had had some of my happiest moments two decades before was now covered with trash. The excuse for the overflowing pails was that there were different unions for the upper and lower campuses and they were competing for control and funds.
If only for the cosmetic reasons that trash is such an eyesore, I would like to see people pick up after themselves. "Put trash in its place," as the old campaign said it. It seems shocking that people do not seem to realize that trash attracts rodents, insects, bacteria, viruses. We need to teach people that they are hurting themselves by these habits and empoverished communities need well-equipped team to help.
The Third World agricultural societies traditionally discarded unwanted items under their houses or in the gardens. Fruit and vegetables skins, human and animal waste, tissue and bones decayed into the soil within a year or two and served to fertilize the earth. Now designer water bottles, plastic shopping bags, and soda cans -- not to mention the wastewater polluted with washing liquids -- all go into the backyard creating hideous personal dumps. Animals tear open the bags. I watched a goat the other day butting a garbage bag and monkeys carrying soda cans across telephone wires.
So - how do we solve the problems of the world? Poverty, hunger, pollution? Here's my idea. Governments start by offering payment to anyone who is living below the local "poverty line" to collect garbage. Teams could be put together and given equipment. In the U.S. and elsewhere, certain communities have become conscientious about recycling -- and thousands of poor people bring metal, glass, and plastics to centers for which they receive much needed pennies. Teams of collectors could be assmbled go out (in lieu of Boy Scouts doing annual cleanups) regularly and pick up the landscape, or be sent to communities to clean up individual hoarders and unofficial dump sites. What can be recycled needs to be systematically organized and the income returned to individuals and communities.
Across the seas and along the seashores, plastic could be collected or swept along by the many cargo ships. Special ships could be sent out to the places where the plastic shreds collect in shoals. These floating islands can be nudged towards the north or the south poles.
Global warming, many scientists think, is occurring because as the atmosphere warms, ice and snow melts. The melting reduces the surface whiteness that reflects the sun, therefore more sunlight reaches the earth which speeds up the warming process.
So here's a counter measure. Sweep the garbage north, drop it from airplanes, deliver it on barges. At each pole, collect the plastic and other manmade detritus from the sea into huge plastic islands. Let the plastic bags from stores around the world and the shreds that choke the fish of the seas be compacted and reused to stop the melting of the poles. Until we can resolve the problems of disposal and recycling of petroleum, rubber, and other products that fill the landfills around the world, perhaps we could put our garbage to work. Let it serve to reflect the sun, cool the planet, and save us from submerging beneath the sea.
It is something like this -- a circle that offers rewards at each step -- that seems to me is our ultimate hope.
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| Bangsaen Beach, Thailand |
Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)
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| Langkawi island, Malaysia |
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