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Literature and philosophy love pithy phrases such as “I think, therefore I am” from Frenchman René Descartes. William Shakespeare in “The Tempest”: “What is past is prologue.” And, more recently, Alice Waters’s book “We Are What We Eat.”
After picking up trash on Earth Day, I suggest a grubbier summation: We are what we toss.
Litter is a mirror, and picking up trash can be like archaeology without the excavation. No digging is needed to eyeball what we discard on purpose. Friends of Sligo Creek assigned volunteers to pick up litter at a large storm water pond south of Wheaton. It acts like a kidney to cleanse surface water that flows into Sligo Creek and then the Anacostia River and Chesapeake Bay.
Signs at this storm water pond warn not to drink the gunky water and not to swim. Geese, egrets and even eagles don’t seem to mind, which means plenty of food lives in that pond. Birdwatchers and photographers are attracted to this retention pond.
When we arrived on Earth Day, wearing muck boots and gloves, a longtime Friend of Sligo Creek leader seemed a bit worried that the area was perhaps too clean to justify a cleanup. Twenty volunteers filled that many trash bags. The biggest find, a mud-covered grocery cart, wouldn’t fit in a bag.
The Earth Day trash certifies our craving for convenience and our hypocrisy. We say we don’t like throwaway water containers. More than 1 million bottles of water are sold every minute around the world. Plastic water bottles were the No. 1 litter item we found on Earth Day. We say we’ve had it with plastic straws. I picked straws of every size and color. We know cans are recyclable. Two of our litter bags were filled with beer cans. We love convenience.
Like hypocrisy, there’s enough irony to go around, too. A new item in litter inventory is something meant to protect us: the face mask.
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