Not all Phish fans clean up after themselves. Photos by Greggory Moore.
I have never in my so-called adult life taken part in a beach clean-up or river clean-up or neighborhood clean-up or anything resembling this. It’s not because I’m against them. It’s not because they’re usually in the morning, when I tend to be unconscious. It’s nothing more than I can’t be bothered.
I’m not proud of that sentiment—people who organize or volunteer for such events are to be commended—but I’m not exactly ashamed of it, either. It’s not complicated as to why: I feel in no way obligated to clean up after others.
I do, however, feel obligated to clean up after myself. Always have. Long before I was a Green Party-supporting, “tree-hugging libtard” (still my favorite insult ever), before I ever thought to make sure to ask for a non-disposable if I were having my coffee for here, before I had even recycled a single plastic bottle, I felt the obligation not to contribute unduly to the trashing of our society. Generate a piece of refuse, put it in the proper receptacle. It was the least I could do.
Clearly, that is asking too much of many, many people, and it shocks me. On dozens of occasions I have seen a child with a candy bar and simply drop the wrapper to the pavement at her feet—a behavior you can be damn sure the little litterbug learned from Mommy and Daddy. I can’t jog a quarter-mile in this town without seeing numerous pieces of garbage on the grass. Discarded soft drinks sit on seemingly every other busstop. Cigarette butts dot every sidewalk. It’s not that rare to find half-eaten food attracting cockroaches and ants to its perch on a low wall or the middle of a condominium’s manicured lawn.
You live in Long Beach, California, the United States, so none of this is news to you. And perhaps you’re not a guilty party. But someone’s doing it. A lot of someones. So many that we might regard it as the status quo. My garbage is not my problem.
The two images I captured here brought this problem back to mind. The first I saw in the Long Beach Sports Arena as I exited the recent Phish concert. The colorful, expansive array of garbage was almost beautiful, at least if you could ignore what it said about the departing crowd.
Part of why I find the image so arresting is the context. A Phish audience is one of the nicer large crowds you’ll ever have the pleasure to encounter. Considering the hippie-heavy demographic, you would expect these folks to clean up after themselves. But as we can see, it didn’t happen on this night.
I’m far from unsympathetic to the logistics of being on the floor of an arena during a show. There’s no room for trashcans, and you’re not going to want to hold on to your empty cup for an hour while you dance and sing along to whatever crispy jam the band’s laying down. I myself bought a drink, put the cup at my feet when I was done, then promptly forgot it until after we had shifted our ground.
So what did I do? I picked up three cups from the ground and threw them in the garbage as we left. It was the least I could do. After all, if everyone picks up after himself and does nothing else, our trash problem is almost completely eliminated. If each of us goes one tiny step further and occasionally picks up a stray piece of garbage not of our making, suddenly we’ve got relatively pristine streets—not to mention forests, rivers, etc.—throughout the entire nation.
Dish trays are often used for other purposes.
The second image is more subtle, yet no less indicative of the “not my problem” mindset that cripples our ability to live in a relatively litter-free world. It was taken at The GreenHouse, a coffeehouse in the East Village Arts District. Like many such establishments in which there is no waitstaff expecting tips on tabletops in exchange for serving you, The GreenHouse sets out a bin, implicitly asking patrons to bus their own tables. Some do, some don’t, but presumably everyone who spots the bins understands the concept: the bins are for dishes, which are eventually taken to the back and washed.
Why, then, can you almost always spot trash—used napkins, paper cups, recyclable plastics and garbage of all sorts—in these bins? It’s not like there aren’t trash receptacles in plain sight no more than steps away. My question is rhetorical, of course, because we know the answer: It’s not my problem. A large percentage of our friends and neighbors suffer no qualm over making minimum-wage workers separate, by hand, the soiled refuse from the dishes, even though saving their brothers and sisters the trouble would cost them almost literally no effort.
I can’t fathom how this state of affairs came to exist, let alone persists. My parents were not environmentalists; they had no particular connection to the Earth. But you don’t need to be a tree-hugging libtard to impart to others that you just don’t wantonly deface our streets and towns and parks, that you don’t force the responsibility for your consumerism onto others.
It’s great to take part in special events that have us cleaning up after others—a needful activity, unfortunately. But the more pressing activity is to normalize the idea of cleaning up after ourselves, to convince society as a whole that that is the least we as individuals can do.
How to bring about the change? Apparently it’s easier said than done.