Over the last four years litter has increased manyfold. The greatest quantity as you would expect is below the wall that borders the main road. Nobody takes responsibility for collecting this, certainly not the landowners. Seeing as this is not a pleasant place to walk, just yards from the traffic, not many people feel the need to complain or may not even be aware of it.Plastic bags blowing onto the site after gales endearingly attach themselves to trees, and there's an occasional balloon released from some distant event.
More troubling than this is the increase in drinks containers cast aside considerately by cyclists. I have known cyclists who indignantly deny that this is the responsibility of others who share their mode of propulsion. But its hard to go against direct observation. It seems to go with the activity. I've always thought that the persons who move most slowly are the ones who most respect their surroundings. They live longer with what's around them. It's a truism of modern life that the quicker you're gone the less you're bothered with what you've left behind.
It all seems to bear out what Dalrymple writes this weekend:
The environment is what we all live in, of course, but to judge by their behaviour the British don't think much of it. They can't see an open space, or a landscape, without throwing a plastic bottle or a tin can at it.
2 comments:
I agree. However, it's not only a British problem. It is a huge issue here in America also.
I think here in Britain some of us feel it very deeply simply because we haven't got as much space for recreation as larger countries like the USA. We like to think we've found our own small, quiet, slow-moving patch of natural wildness and then, what the hell, some so and so shoots past at speed chucking an empty plastic bottle over his shoulder.
Then if you protest they yell "Whosamarrer wi you! Think you own the place do yer?" ....or something marginally less elegant.
This is what we inherit from our civilised European culture.
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