Messages of Hope:Towards a Litter Free Environment: A System of Hope

It is easy to let hopelessness wash over you when you take a closer look at the green spaces in our community where flora is decorated with litter items including fast food wrappings, cigarette butts and numerous decaying garbage articles.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard comments along the lines of, "the litter shouldn't be there in the first place, people should know better, our leaders should do something to make people think twice about littering like slap litterbugs with tougher penalties" and so on. I could ramble on at this point about why people litter, this would include a long list of psychological, socioeconomic, and other reasons as to why litter is a problem we face today. But all I will tell you is that, you don't know what you got until you don't have it or rather, you don't know what you got, until you compare it to what others have or do not have.

And what I have found is that we can truly be thankful for the systems in place to manage our garbage. These systems make it possible for us to dispose our garbage in the first place! I'm talking about the fact that we can put our garbage out on the curb and have it properly disposed of at a landfill site; and the cherry on top, we have curb side recycling and composting in Mission, B.C. We have it so good, we don't even know it. What would our green spaces look like if this system was not in place? I can imagine. When I travelled to Nigeria in 2007 I witnessed this predicament.

Shel Silverstein's "Sarah Stout" who would not take the garbage out would find Nigeria a most desirable home. There, no one takes the garbage out. Garbage lines the streets, the ditches, the corn fields, the markets, the hillsides, the street embankments; it is simply everywhere. Imagine the stink. Imagine the unsightly landscape. In Nigeria, there is no waste management system in place; there is no landfill for that matter. There is litter everywhere because there is no litter bins to toss garbage into in the first place, and no designated place to take the garbage even if it were put in the trash. (Notwithstanding obvious reasons for Nigeria's impoverished landscapes such as poverty, corrupt governments, etc.) On one hand, witnessing the environmental degradation of litter in places like Nigeria generates further hopelessness; on the other hand, it carries a message of hope. The message of hope is obvious, we live in a country where our government invests in a system to manage our waste. It may not be perfect, but it exists. Perhaps, when we can see 'what we have' here in Mission, B.C. and seeing what it would look like if we 'did not have' - we can not only feel hope again about the state of the environment and the problem of litter - but we may also be able to help developing countries to develop workable and affordable waste management systems.