Stop It

April 29, 2016

Aside from the natural beauty, there is another common thread connecting our local hiking and biking trails and waterways: trash.

Whether you’re on Leelanau County’s Heritage Trail, anyplace on Traverse City’s TART Trail, or floating the Boardman, there is trash aplenty.

Gum wrappers, drink cups, cigarette packages, beer cans, plastic bags; anything that should have been thrown in a garbage can is tossed on the ground by unthinking dunderheads. And if not on the ground then in the water. The Boardman River has yielded furniture, appliances and plenty of tires.

Despite Herculean efforts of volunteers — the TART cleanup just occurred and the Boardman River Clean Sweep takes place May 28 — we just keep trashing our trails and waterways.

It’s disappointing but not at all unique to northern Michigan.

Our national parks, the gems of our wildlands, are protected from all manner of insults except inexplicable human behavior. According to the National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park alone had 3,000 tons of trash hauled out of the park last year. A bit more than 90 percent of that was deposited properly in garbage cans and recycling locations. But nearly 10 percent, a whopping 300 tons, was left on the ground or in the water.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore collects about 69 tons of trash annually, 88 percent of which is recycled. A swarm of dedicated volunteers pick up litter on the dunes and along the shoreline.

At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most popular of our national parks with 10 million annual visitors, volunteers spend more than 10,000 hours annually picking up improperly disposed of trash left behind.

We just love nature. Nearly to death, in fact.

This is one of those “problems” with the simplest of solutions: Stop it. There is no government conspiracy here, no oppressing of anyone, no establishment trying to control anything, no one percenter receiving something we can’t have. The usual suspects we now like to blame for everything aren’t in the crosshairs this time. There is no one to blame but thoughtless people tossing their trash on the ground and leaving it for someone else to clean up.

Our trail systems are among the region’s great assets. They are not landfills for McDonald’s wrappers nor recycling centers for beer cans and water bottles nor ashtrays for cigarette butts. We’re able to tote that material onto the trail so we should be able to tote it out empty.

Show some pride in the natural beauty we’ve been given. Trashing our trail systems, streams and rivers is monumentally irresponsible. Please stop it.

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Speaking of trash, TIME Magazine just announced their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. My dictionary defines influence as “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of another or others...”

TIME uses a different dictionary altogether. They believe influence involves breaking things. Their criteria is people who “broke the rules, broke the record, broke the silence, broke the boundaries...”

This is apparently a uniquely American trait, considering that 49 of the magic 100 are from here. And way too many of them are entertainers or jocks or both. They made the list because, among other things, they had a lot of Twitter followers or Facebook “likes.” Some had movie hits or sold a lot of records.

The list is very diverse, almost mathematically so. Plenty of women, plenty of minorities, even a woman who used to be a man. What’s lacking is any sense of geographic or geopolitical reality.

China, the most populous country on the planet, had five people on the list. Five. Maybe the Chinese just aren’t loud enough, but it does seem there might be more than five of them more influential than, say, actress Charlize Theron or golfer Jordan Spieth, both of whom are on the list.

India, with all of its engineers and computer scientists and a billion or so people, did a little better with seven nods. The entire continents of Africa and South America managed a combined nine influential people, less than 20 percent of our total.

Poor little Australia was shut out completely.

Not a single teacher, from pre-school to graduate school or anything in between, made the list. Maybe not enough Twitter followers. There was a university president, American of course, but no one from a classroom.

To be fair, the list does include some world leaders, medical researchers and other scientists and humanitarians who are truly influential. Not all of them have a positive influence, but an influence they do have.

The TIME list is good for entertainment and good-natured debate but not much else. Most influential? Nicki Minaj? Seriously? Just stop it.