Your Trash Is My Responsibility Too

            Cities are dirty. We tend to assume that they are supposed to be a mess. The soda can, the candy bar wrapper, the cigarette butts piled up along the curb seem to just belong. Of all the years I have spent going into Philadelphia, I don’t think I have ever stopped and picked up a piece of garbage. Whether it was because there was just too much of it there, or because it seemed so natural, or because it was not me who put it there – I kept on walking.

            In the dead of winter when all of the leaves have fallen and the web of pricker bushes has fallen back, even the banks of the Brandywine River can look like a vacant lot in North Philadelphia. The last time I went walking along the bank I passed a large pile of trash that had begun to accumulate. When I got home I felt bad for two reasons;  my favorite walking place was markedly uglier, and I did nothing to fix it.

            It occurred to me that other people’s trash is in fact my problem. I have done roadside and river cleanups in the past, so it is not like I have been against picking up someone else’s trash. Often if I am out on a hike or a canoe trip I will pick up trash if I see it, but I have been indoctrinated to believe that picking up someone else’s trash is some sort of service project, something you volunteer for, maybe get credit for. It was in that moment when I got home that I realized the pile of trash there on the shore was not waiting for an act of goodwill, but was my responsibility.

            It is irrelevant whether or not someone intentionally threw the trash on the ground or not. The fact is that it currently resides in my home waterway. It would be impossible to even establish where this trash came from. Yes, someone could have thrown the soda can out the car window after they finished it, but maybe it was in a recycling bin which blew over in the wind and found its way here. The problem is not what we choose to do with our trash, but the fact that we make it all. We make way too much. All of us do.

            What would happen if the litterers of the world knew that someone would be cleaning up there mess? Would they remain apathetic, or even relieved? Or instead, would they begin to see that nothing ever just goes away? If I walk past trash and don’t pick it up, I might as well have put it there. After all, we are all in this together. And for that reason, I am happy to clean up your/our mess.