The world shouldn't be your garbage can

What is it that prompts people to toss their bag of fast food garbage along the side of the road for someone else to clean up, and not just on the passenger side floorboard for disposal at home in the trash can?

Or what was it that made it right for someone to chuck car parts along the Centennial Trail in Spokane Valley?

Worse yet, and incredibly sad, how was the river the place to dispose of a dead female body that a rafter discovered Sept. 15 while participating in a stem-to-stern cleanup day on a stretch of the Spokane River from the Idaho stateline through downtown?

Spending a morning sprucing up the Spokane River, as has been done for much of the last 25 years by groups like the Northwest Whitewater Association, the Spokane River Forum, Spokane Riverkeeper and The Lands Council, is certainly an eye-opening experience.

And it constantly dredges up as many questions as tons of garbage. Thankfully, the deceased person is a first‚ and hopefully the last find of its kind.

People litter because they do not feel responsible for public areas like streets and parks, so said the website of an effort in Chicago to clean the streets and parks. The more they litter, the more it becomes a habit, and the worse the community looks.

 People usually litter outside their own neighborhood where their trash becomes someone else’s problem.

Here, what is amazing is that every time volunteers gather to walk the shoreline, or hit the water in search of stuff not reachable from land, what is brought back to collection sites never ceases to amaze.

Old tires, 150-year-old steel wagon wheel rims, clothes washers, street signs, discarded containers from someone’s oil change, a manhole cover that weighed over 100 pounds come immediately to mind from recent personal involvement.

I should have kept a log from day-one back in 1993? Or maybe not? Untold poundage of discarded construction debris from reconstruction of the Maple Street Bridge was also memorable as it weighed down a half-dozen rafts.

Collecting trash from rivers has actually become the fulltime job of Chad Pregracke, who according to a CNN story — and his recent speaking engagement in Spokane at a River Forum event — in the past 15 years has helped pull more than 67,000 tires from U.S. waterways. But that’s just the beginning of his work.

Along with the river, which is such a special place, so is a decades-old camping spot along Deadman’s Creek in Ferry County.

Much to my dismay, when we took my grandkids there earlier this summer for their first overnighter at “Cow Camp,” we got to do a little exercise in doing our part to clean up someone else’s garbage, tossed into a little hole right above the creek.

Hopefully it was a good lesson for the youngsters of what not to do, just yards from the “Pack it in, pack it out” sign.

According to statistics derived from the Keep America Beautiful campaign, along roadways, motorists (52 percent) and pedestrians (23 percent) are the biggest contributors to litter. 

Research also shows that individuals under 30 are more likely to litter than those who are older.

In fact, age, and not gender, is a significant predictor of littering behavior, their report went on to note.

I wonder who and how they get people to admit they are such slobs? 

Maybe they are the same lazy SOBs who find it so hard to walk 20 feet to take their shopping carts back to where they belong?

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com