Littering, like recycling is gravely misunderstood. Recycling is as much of a joke as littering penalties are.
Recycling is a counter-productive, make-work, green-washing project that helps people feel good about their wanton consumption and industry's wasteful practices in packaging, planned obsolescence, and intentional flushing away of resources and the fruits of human labor as per Orwell's explanation of the purpose of endless war.
Instead of changing in the underlying root causes of our mountains of garbage and oceanic garbage gyres, we make ourselves feel better by doing persnickety sorting of products that were waste the second they were produced. Like a litany or rosemary or other inane ritual.
Likewise littering prohibitions are a total denial of root causes and the severity of the waste problem. They are a way of assuaging the guilt one might feel by participating in it. Why should we have nice tidy urban and rural areas when the truth is many hectare of garbage deeper than a house and leachates as filthy as sin exist in abundance, and the world's beaches are slathered in used condoms, hypodermic needles and broken flip flops? Doesn't that actually hide the truth and the urgency of the situation? Who is motivated to make major lifestyle changes while their backyard looks as pristine as a golf course? Nobody, that's who. If the trash and litter of our consumption system isn't swept under the rug, people will, after blaming the lower classes, be more aware that there even is a problem and certainly to take action that actually makes a difference. And picking up litter along roadsides is not such action. That may help the tourism industry, but it means precisely zero towards the goal of waste elimination at the source: production, packaging and distribution.
So clutch your pearls and do your rounds on the fog lawn in your two stroke golf cart looking for gum wrappers and crumpled paper. The truth is things break down better when exposed to the elements than when buried. Especially to UV. That pesky cigarette package cellophane wrapper will last till the end of time covered by soil while it will break down in weeks exposed to direct sunlight...
Be real. Be honest. Be helpful. Litter everywhere you go. Don't even hesitate, especially in national parks! Why should the animals in the park be treated any better than the raccoons in the city? Certainly humans don't deserve better. And fuck the duck or penguin that gets its neck stuck in a six pack ring thing. The more dead birds we see, preferably covered in oil from a slick, the more we might think about the millions of unseen and unsung deaths caused by similar but less visible pollution, such as asthma deaths or colony collapse or parasites on young salmon or lead poisoning.
There are five Rs if you remember. Only one of them is recycling and none of them is NIMBYISM you numskull. The most important is REDUCE. Everyone seems to have forgotten that. They have also forgotten the Broken Window Fallacy, which states that there is a net loss from repairing broken components of a system, not a net gain. The gains for fixing fuck ups are localized to the fuck up fixer fuckers and the economy as a whole suffers because those resources could have been used to, it's funny I know, create or innovate or invigorate the total.
So no, picking up trash and sorting it into different piles and re-smelting cans and bottles is never ever ever in a million billion years going to be the solution. Neither is pretending we aren't a disgusting rapacious filth race. Any more than piping a metropolis' sewage out into the ocean untreated is an actual solution. Do what you know is right and shit on your front lawn and throw animal carcasses out your window in your daily commute to your job at the dick head diner. It's morally superior to driving a hybrid and bringing your trash home, bagging it thrice and then having a heavy duty truck drive it to the dump to be buried and have another shitty suburb built over the gigantic landfill, even if there is a methane co-gen plant running off it that powers three and a half trash compactors in the neighborhood. Obviously.
One thing to remember for sure is that any container with a deposit should never be thrown into a bin or any other difficult spot to access. Pop or beer cans and bottles should be openly and brazenly thrown beside garbage cans or simply alongside the walk or curb. To make it easier for the collector of said can or bottle.
Recycling is a counter-productive, make-work, green-washing project that helps people feel good about their wanton consumption and industry's wasteful practices in packaging, planned obsolescence, and intentional flushing away of resources and the fruits of human labor as per Orwell's explanation of the purpose of endless war.
Instead of changing in the underlying root causes of our mountains of garbage and oceanic garbage gyres, we make ourselves feel better by doing persnickety sorting of products that were waste the second they were produced. Like a litany or rosemary or other inane ritual.
Likewise littering prohibitions are a total denial of root causes and the severity of the waste problem. They are a way of assuaging the guilt one might feel by participating in it. Why should we have nice tidy urban and rural areas when the truth is many hectare of garbage deeper than a house and leachates as filthy as sin exist in abundance, and the world's beaches are slathered in used condoms, hypodermic needles and broken flip flops? Doesn't that actually hide the truth and the urgency of the situation? Who is motivated to make major lifestyle changes while their backyard looks as pristine as a golf course? Nobody, that's who. If the trash and litter of our consumption system isn't swept under the rug, people will, after blaming the lower classes, be more aware that there even is a problem and certainly to take action that actually makes a difference. And picking up litter along roadsides is not such action. That may help the tourism industry, but it means precisely zero towards the goal of waste elimination at the source: production, packaging and distribution.
So clutch your pearls and do your rounds on the fog lawn in your two stroke golf cart looking for gum wrappers and crumpled paper. The truth is things break down better when exposed to the elements than when buried. Especially to UV. That pesky cigarette package cellophane wrapper will last till the end of time covered by soil while it will break down in weeks exposed to direct sunlight...
Be real. Be honest. Be helpful. Litter everywhere you go. Don't even hesitate, especially in national parks! Why should the animals in the park be treated any better than the raccoons in the city? Certainly humans don't deserve better. And fuck the duck or penguin that gets its neck stuck in a six pack ring thing. The more dead birds we see, preferably covered in oil from a slick, the more we might think about the millions of unseen and unsung deaths caused by similar but less visible pollution, such as asthma deaths or colony collapse or parasites on young salmon or lead poisoning.
There are five Rs if you remember. Only one of them is recycling and none of them is NIMBYISM you numskull. The most important is REDUCE. Everyone seems to have forgotten that. They have also forgotten the Broken Window Fallacy, which states that there is a net loss from repairing broken components of a system, not a net gain. The gains for fixing fuck ups are localized to the fuck up fixer fuckers and the economy as a whole suffers because those resources could have been used to, it's funny I know, create or innovate or invigorate the total.
So no, picking up trash and sorting it into different piles and re-smelting cans and bottles is never ever ever in a million billion years going to be the solution. Neither is pretending we aren't a disgusting rapacious filth race. Any more than piping a metropolis' sewage out into the ocean untreated is an actual solution. Do what you know is right and shit on your front lawn and throw animal carcasses out your window in your daily commute to your job at the dick head diner. It's morally superior to driving a hybrid and bringing your trash home, bagging it thrice and then having a heavy duty truck drive it to the dump to be buried and have another shitty suburb built over the gigantic landfill, even if there is a methane co-gen plant running off it that powers three and a half trash compactors in the neighborhood. Obviously.
One thing to remember for sure is that any container with a deposit should never be thrown into a bin or any other difficult spot to access. Pop or beer cans and bottles should be openly and brazenly thrown beside garbage cans or simply alongside the walk or curb. To make it easier for the collector of said can or bottle.