Personal Dumping Grounds.

I grew up in a country where it was drummed into us as school children that we lived in a clean green country. And, for the most part, it was. I remember at school, a popular punishment was to make you walk around the school grounds picking up trash at lunchtime, which was dubbed the Womble Patrol, in honor of the furry little British characters who lived to pick up trash and reuse it somehow, wearing a high-vis vest and workman’s gloves, just in case you weren’t embarrassed enough. 

Obviously, along the roads, you’d find bits of trash, and cigarette butts (because that was when people smoked everywhere, especially in their cars where you just flicked the butt out the window to smolder away in the gutter or side of the road until it burnt out – occasionally starting forest fires), discarded cans and soda bottles, candy wrappers, etc, but off the roadways as a kid you could run around empty sections and patches of bush and on the beaches and around your neighborhood, without worrying about more than the obstacles nature put there…prickles, thistles, blackberry bushes, gorse, bees, wasps and maybe some broken glass, stuff that kept you alert to your surroundings as you ran around outside.  

Like most things, this was something I took for granted, and it wasn’t until I moved away from home to the city that I started to notice trash. Especially when you spend your time as a pedestrian, walking and catching public transport you tend to notice what’s on the street.  

But it was never really more than basic consumable trash, bottles, food containers, and the like. I think it stems from the fact that it was an island nation, and stuff was expensive. Better to fix your old washer than take it for a drive and ditch it somewhere. 

Although, none of that prepared me for the trash in the U.S, here is a culture that takes disposing of shit they are done with to a whole new level, with total disregard for the earth or nature, or water supply or anything. They throw shit away like it’s their right. 

Maybe that’s what “freedom” refers to. 

In Colorado, you’d go for a hike through all types of terrain and then get to the halfway point in a high mountain desert area and there’d be rusted-out washing machines or dryers or shot-up tube televisions or microwaves in a gully somewhere off the trailhead. 

In the tobacco country of North Carolina, you’d see houses and businesses that people had just walked away from. Windows broken, wood splintered and the house looking lonely and sad. Waiting for the slow process of nature to reclaim it.

Randomly, I find it hard to align, that there are so many homeless people in this country, but also so many deserted and uninhabited dwellings.

In South Carolina, it seems people carry their trash in their cars and just fling it out the window as they are driving down beautiful tree-lined roads, or along stretches of marshland, I wonder if they even stop the car. They also eat takeout in their cars a lot because that just gets thrown out of car windows too. All of it. Bags, napkins, utensils, drinks, and half-eaten food.

But I gotta say, the area we live in now takes the cake. Besides the bags of trash on busy roads, that I often wonder if a body is in there, there is a whole new approach to getting rid of the things you don’t want that had never entered my mind before.  

The area I live in is semi-rural with acres of overgrown brush and woods within walking distance from people’s homes, which are used as personal dumping grounds. 

I’ve seen people walk down the road with plants or Christmas trees, and I watch them as discretely as possible because I’m curious as to where they are going, I hardly ever see anyone walking around the neighborhood, and these people don’t look like they are comfortable walking. Maybe it’s because they are carrying a half-dead plant in a foil pot holder, or a tree. 

This is admittedly difficult because there are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, it’s not that they forgot to put them in, but that there is no reason for a sidewalk because nobody walks outside further than their vehicle. 

It’s so rare in fact, that when a place is advertised for rent or sale, they will actually note that there are sidewalks in the neighborhood. Like it’s a valuable selling point.

So, I will watch them, usually a couple out for a stroll with a ridiculous out-of-place item, and see them make a beeline for the treeline, walk right up to the edge, and hoist said item with as much strength as possible into the trees. Then they quickly turn away and keep walking naturally, like a couple out for a walk together. 

There is also a “Leaf Litter Drop” at the end of my street by the Municipal Works area. Which apparently is code for “Any freaking outdoor or paving trash you don’t know what else to do with .” There are mangled pieces of tree, broken up pieces of roading, broken pavers and paving stones, and dumped trailer loads of sand or mulch. 

All just ditched, regardless of the biodegradability of the item. And, walking through the trees along the boundaries of the back of people’s yards, there is an infinite number of pots once belonging with plants, plants long dead thrown into the woods like its a magic well, ready to just take everything away. 

Personally, this blows my mind. 

How can you just throw shit away like that? How do you see yourself as so entitled you can just throw yourself trash wherever the hell you want? I think this mindset reflects tellingly on the psyche of a population; with no regard for their impact on the world around them, how can you honestly expect them to actually recognize or care to do anything about the earth or climate change? It is conscious ignorance at its best.

There is also a massive development slated for most of the woods around our neighborhood, already they have started bulldozing trees, wrenching them violently out of the ground, and plowing everything down. 

I wonder if the people in my area are scared of losing their dumping grounds. 

It must be a pain in the butt for a developer to have to clear out the first 100 or so feet of wooded scrubland areas of useless trash and junk. 

Although it’s not like they send lumberjacks in to start clearing the land, they choose to do that as violently as possible too. Turning earth-moving machinery into battle instruments with trees and shrubs and undergrowth crushing and ripping and killing in the name of progress. I had never thought of land clearing as violent until I witnessed this process, but the way they attack the environment is violent.

There used to be woodland box turtles around the area, and you’d see them a lot after it rained, as their homes would be temporarily flooded out. I would usually pick them off the road and set them back on the edge of the woods, pointing them in the direction of the woods. 

They seem to have vanished. I can’t even start to imagine what other small animals were slaughtered in losing their habitat. At least the big ones like the deer, foxes, and coyotes can move away from the area relatively quickly. The explanation of “well that’s just the price of development” gets thrown around like that makes it ok, but it doesn’t. Again with conscious ignorance. 

At times I understand the logic of Thanos, wiping out half of the population would definitely reduce the strain on the planet. But it’s the logistics of that one that get a little squirrely. Suddenly everyone’s got an opinion.