152 Pieces Per Person

Nearly 10 billion butts!

Did you catch the Things You Didn’t Know About Litter presentation the other day? Among all of the great data points provided was one from the Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study: there are an estimated 50 billion pieces of litter out in our environment. That's around 152 beer cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, grocery bags, and assorted other scraps of civilization for each and every person in the country.

From Keep America Beautiful

152 pieces of litter.

If you have been around the Greenway in recent days, it's probably not hard to believe! This time of year litter is conspicuous: heavy spring rains and snowmelt wash trash from roadsides into the Greenway, and strong winds can blow trash out of bins that aren't secured, off passing vehicles, and out of nearby construction areas. Much of the tall grass and stems that may have kept the ground from sight has been flattened by those same winds, revealing piles of plastic, styrofoam, and aluminum.

What is to be done about all this trash? Well, first of all...pick it up! Join the SDNA Team Up to Clean Up event on Sunday, April 24 to help clean up the Greenway. Bring a bag on your walks around the neighborhood, or informally "adopt" a stretch of road that you notice looking trashy. Can you pick up 152 pieces of litter? Or maybe 304 pieces? How about 608 pieces?!

The presenters for the program, Jane Wilch, Recycling Coordinator for the city, and Beth MacKenzie, UI Sustainability Program Manager, offered suggestions for being involved beyond simply picking up trash, including helping to collect valuable data through an app like Litterati or Marine Debris Tracker, which can help scientists and policymakers understand where trash comes from and where it ends up, and hopefully develop solutions to prevent it.

But why should I have to pick it up? I didn't put it there.

Good point. The easy answer is, if not you, who? I, personally, can't tackle every person tossing a can out of their car window and force them to find a recycle bin. I can't personally issue citations to people who leave their dog's waste bags along the trail "to get on the way back" (but never seem to come back the same way). I can't march the developers out into the Greenway to pick up their construction debris after a windy day. But I can spend an hour or two every month cleaning up, just because it needs to be done.

But we're just individuals, it's the corporations causing this mess with their single-use packaging and shoddy, cheap manufacturing methods! Make them clean up after themselves!

Absolutely. That's why things like our Bottle Bill and other producer responsibility legislation should be a priority. The price of a product should include its entire lifecycle, from creation through use to disposal. States with a bottle bill recycle more than twice as many of their beverage containers than those without.

Have you been to festivals downtown, where the food vendors use compostable utensils and charge a higher price because those materials cost more? That's exactly backwards of what it should be. Imagine if the disposable plastic knives and forks, the styrofoam to-go clamshells and the plastic wrap all had to include the costs to recycle or landfill them in the up-front cost, instead of allowing those costs to be covered by our municipal waste systems. Would the compostable materials still seem more expensive? Would people make different choices if they had all the facts, and the products were priced accordingly?

And yet...the litter is out there. I can lobby for a better Bottle Bill, and for EPR legislation. I can make better choices in my purchases. But none of that beats the satisfaction of filling a few bags with litter and seeing a clean Greenway when I'm done.

Sun-bleaching on littered cans near the Greenway

Holy Moly

 Most outings to the Greenway or walking around town elicit small exclamations: Hello, friend sparrow! Good to see you again, dandelion! And what are you, shiny little beetle? 

An nod of greeting to neighbors, a sometimes-rote acknowledgement of an acquaintance, an occasionally delighted encounter with an occasional passerby. But some lucky days you get a Holy moly! Not quite breathtaking, not quite rare and exciting, but a neat reward for venturing outside and keeping your eyes open.

The first holy moly was a golfball-sized gall on the thick square stem of a Cup Plant. I was familiar with the varieties of goldenrod galls, and some of the galls found on oak leaves and stems. But I'd never noticed one on Cup Plant. It has a cheerful little remnant of a dried leaf trailing off the top of the gall like a pennant. I snapped it off with a length of the stem to bring home for further study, carrying it in my hand to ensure it didn't get broken in a pocket.

It doesn't look like much...
maybe you had to be there.

As I was happily pondering my new gall (or as my mind wandered, variously my queenly scepter, my wizard's wand, my drum major baton...it was a stem that captured the imagination), I turned off the trail to the mowed path leading to the wetlands, and practically ran headlong into a huge bird cresting the hill from the wetlands. Holy moly! A second bird followed, and as my imagination transitioned from the gall-topped stem to fantastic sight before it, the unmistakable call of Sandhill Cranes erupted from the birds.

Without thinking I chucked my prized gall stem to the ground to try to catch a photo or two before they flew out of sight. Instead they swerved north and alighted in the corn stubble just to the north, carefully foraging long enough for a few more pictures. I picked up my stem, fortunately unharmed, and headed back north along the trail.  

And then--a holy moly trilogy! Clutching my gall stem in one hand, the other warming in a pocket, a chunky little bird flies past, silhouetted against the afternoon sun, its long bill hanging in front of it like a proboscis. An American Woodcock! I turn to watch it wing south, simply enjoying the moment without frantically attempting to get a photo of the fast-moving blob against the light, until I lost sight of it. As big and charismatic as the cranes are, the woodcock is a much more subtle bird and one I rarely catch sight of. What a treat of an afternoon!

Gift of a Gloomy Morning

 

After so many years of sharing the sights along the Greenway, I realize how often I let the opportunity to get good pictures--bright skies, low wind--influence whether I go out for a walk or stay home. In our visual-media-centric world, crisp pictures engage with an immediacy that the most beautifully crafted sentence can't match. 

 

 

So this morning when I went out to catch the sunrise...a little too late...I found myself in a gray
morning surrounded by birds that were always moving just a little too fast in a gloom a little too dark to capture. But what birds! It's the best time of year, when mornings are blanketed in birdsong, from the first cardinal just before dawn to the cacophony of red-winged blackbirds congregated in a tree. 

 

Tuning down my eyes and tuning up my ears, I headed toward the wetlands where I could hear Canada geese honking and...what's that? The sandhill cranes are back! Dueling calls from the south and the north echoed across the water.

 

 

Among the dry cattail stems individual blackbirds were trying out their pipes, along with cardinals and a song sparrow. Far overhead, the higher-pitched squeaky honks of greater white-fronted geese could be heard, and in the distance the occasional killdeer. 

 

 

Then, the darkening sky opened up with the soft patter of a drop of rain that quickly turned into a multitude. I strove to be like the birds, undaunted by a little water, but my (ill-considered) coat absorbs the water rather than letting it bead up and roll off, and my camera must be protected from the elements. As I trundle back towards home, a long rumble of thunder rolls across the cloud-covered sky and I consider how very limited the world is when only seen through the lens of a camera.