By Frosty Wooldridge
Exclusive To Rense
10-17-22

This junked trailer sets on the north side of the "Avenue of the Giants" in California. From such beauty of the 360 feet tall, 140 ton, 2,500 year old redwoods to the utter ugliness of a trashed out area on the north side of the redwood groves. It's really disgusting.

As you travel across this once pristine continent, a mere 150 years ago, it was a land of enormous beauty. Not a single piece of junk disgraced the land. Today, as a long distance touring cyclist for the past 50 years and 15 trips across the USA and once across Canada, I have witnessed thousands of the 50,000,000 personal dumps in the woods, prairie, beaches, farms, gullies, valleys, canyons, rivers, streams and just about anywhere humans can discard their stuff.

When such humans trash the land, the more responsible humans don't do anything to clean it up. Why are there more than 100 million soda pop bottles, cans and plastic containers strewn everywhere in America and Canada? It's mega-worse in Mexico.

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."  Foreword,  A Sand County Almanac .

Why haven't we passed 50 cent deposit-return laws on all plastic, metal and plastic containers coming out of mercantile stores? Why haven't we created a national "Pick up the Trash" week annually? Why haven't we formed "Clean up our Rivers" week, annually?  How about "Pick up Open Dumps" week across America? 

At some point, we just can't keep looking at the millions of open dumps and simply sigh while doing nothing. There's no reason to allow those who would trash North America when we could stop them with simple economics.

We need to change the way we look and treat the Natural World.

To many Americans, the wilderness is little more than a retreat from the tensions of civilization. To others of us, it is a testing place--a vanishing frontier where man can rediscover basic values. And to a few, the wilderness is nothing less than an almost holy source of self-renewal. But for every man, woman and child, the ultimate lesson that Nature teaches is simply this: humanity's fate is inextricably linked to that of the world at large and to all other creatures that live upon it.

Do you agree or disagree? Why? Isn't the land worth your efforts to keep it pristine in your area? What are you doing to make this a better world? What are you doing in your neck of the woods to clean up the Natural World? 

Frosty Wooldridge, six continent world bicycle traveler, who has picked up over 1,000,000 pieces of trash on those six continents