Stradageek wrote:Does litter beget litter?
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Again, I suspect that one group walked away leaving their mess and everyone else just followed suit.
Much like drunken driving, I a massive re-education campaign may be needed to emphasise that littering is socially unacceptable. In my days my parents or the local copper would not have tolerated his behaviour
- or maybe there just wasn't all the excess packaging we have these days (Corona bottles got a refund, sweets came in paper bags, fast food didn't exist )
What do you think?
Litter was cast in the 50s and 60s but there wasn't a hundredth of litter available then, compared to now, to cast aside. The fundamental problem is, indeed, the makers of the litter who accept no responsibility or costs for dealing with it. It should be banned at source - in the factory making the stuff that's often as rubbishy as the packaging it's (excessively) wrapped in.
It's also true that littering begets littering. Several human behaviours follow this pattern, as we humans are defined by our ability and inclination to copy other humans.
I observe this in practice via my daily litter-pick along the Lancaster canal as I walk the dogs. If I manage to get the 10 miles or so of my walking sections clear of visible litter, very little subsequently appears in the next day, week or month. If I'm away for a month somewhere else, the litter has begun again on my return. If I don't remove it toot sweet, the littering will increase as the rubbish-consuming chavs cast the rubbish-wrapper next to the previous chav's chuck. I was away fro 15 months a couple of years ago and on return the canal footpath was awash with litter once more, despite the hundreds of bagfuls I've removed over the years.
Humans are dirty wee beasts if left outside of some pressing social norm to not be a dirty little beast. But these days social norms are regarded as some sort of interference with one's freedom to do as one likes on all occasions. The irony is that these littering non-conformists are in fact merely conforming to a different set of norms - eating and drinking junkfud then throwing away the junk wrappers.
Some of us do try to adhere to better social norms. Often we will be condemned as foolish do-gooders or even little hitlers "telling me what to do". I confess to having Hitleresque fantasies about chucking picnicking parties of littering boaters into the canal, after I've forced them to clean up all their detritus! So they must be right then ....
Dictator Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes