You see litter on the ground. One day, you get it together to be part of the solution—to pick a part of the ground to monitor, gather all the scraps that do not belong to the land, and put them in the trash.
It feels good to see the ground cleared of garbage, to participate in making things better for your cousins—the trees, animals, bacteria, fungi.
Then, later, there’s garbage again. It’s sad and upsetting. All your work undone by other people’s actions.
So you pick up more. Maybe you start bringing trash bags with you wherever you go. But the more litter you pick up, the more you see. You’ve trained yourself to pay attention to the world in a way that the litterers do not. You can’t help but notice it and feel responsible for cleaning it up.
The good feeling becomes overwhelmed by resentment and anger. How exhausting is it to keep doing this work that is never done. Perhaps there’s rage at the insensitive idiots who keep throwing their shit on the ground and do not care about the greater world. Perhaps there’s a sense of martyrdom of why do you have to be the one always picking up other people’s garbage?
So maybe at some point you stop. You become numb for a while. Really it’s unfair to expect one person to do all this work. It’s a collective problem and there should be collective solutions. Perhaps you yell at people who litter, hoping they’ll take responsibility for once. Perhaps you petition for more cleanup workers. Perhaps you completely give up and stop giving a shit, throwing your own litter here and there.
The distance is soothing, but too much. You’ve lost that feeling of participation. It’s all someone else’s problem now, but you’re still living in it. You still see the garbage and that the trees, the animals, the bacteria and the fungi cannot gather it themselves. In fact, it’s killing many of them.
How to live in a world with a caring heart when your own work will never be enough? How to participate in restoring problems you didn’t create? Is it enough to pick up only your own trash? To do an hour in your neighborhood once a week? Once a month? To organize a crew?
Perhaps picking up trash isn’t your passion, simply a feeling of responsibility. There are things you’d rather be doing but it feels like you can never prioritize them because there is so much litter and so few people stepping up. Perhaps you grow to resent even your cousins the trees, the animals, the fungi and the bacteria for being so vulnerable and needing so much care.
There are so many big questions. Cynicism covers over the deep well of caring that made you look at this in the first place. You may feel despairing and trapped. You cannot escape this dilemma of caring about an issue you cannot solve.
Perhaps there are well-meaning people who tell you that this dilemma is “meant” to do something, like soften your heart, or teach you a cosmic lesson. Perhaps this gives you some solace, or perhaps it further outrages you, because in what universe is destroying the environment to teach one person a lesson in patience something that makes any sense?
And yet there is no escape. Destroying yourself to save the environment offers no escape. Numbing yourself in complete disconnection is no escape. You are embedded in this world.
You go back to picking up litter when you find it, when you can, when you’re prepared. It’s not enough. It’s what you can do.
