01-27-2012, 08:53 AM
What a distressing problem.
I feel lucky that my area doesn't have this problem. One time in five years someone left some bulky stuff by the road, but it was picked up by the next day. My area is mostly local families, so not all behave this way.
This is not an excuse, but I think that in the past, the options for waste disposal were not there, and people adopted an attitude that nature and the jungle would decompose the trash. Throw it in the gulch ... whole other mentality.
There is no excuse for it now, but I wonder how much has been passed down from the old days. Another thing about the Pacific islands is that pre-contact, they didn't have all these manufactured items of Western culture. It seems that in general the island cultures didn't quite know how to adapt to disposable culture on a small rock. Hawai'i is not the only Pacific culture where littering is common.
I am not excusing, but I feel there is a background we are not understanding when we condemn. Education on this stuff starts with the children, that is where the chain of habit can be broken.
I think it is a great thing that so many want to be part of clean-ups, but I have trouble motivating myself to pick up other people's litter. It doesn't do anything to reduce littering, and might even encourage people, as someone will pick it up. But then, I was also one of those moms who made my boys pick up their own room, no matter how much it bothered me, it was their opala not mine. [
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I feel lucky that my area doesn't have this problem. One time in five years someone left some bulky stuff by the road, but it was picked up by the next day. My area is mostly local families, so not all behave this way.
This is not an excuse, but I think that in the past, the options for waste disposal were not there, and people adopted an attitude that nature and the jungle would decompose the trash. Throw it in the gulch ... whole other mentality.
There is no excuse for it now, but I wonder how much has been passed down from the old days. Another thing about the Pacific islands is that pre-contact, they didn't have all these manufactured items of Western culture. It seems that in general the island cultures didn't quite know how to adapt to disposable culture on a small rock. Hawai'i is not the only Pacific culture where littering is common.
I am not excusing, but I feel there is a background we are not understanding when we condemn. Education on this stuff starts with the children, that is where the chain of habit can be broken.
I think it is a great thing that so many want to be part of clean-ups, but I have trouble motivating myself to pick up other people's litter. It doesn't do anything to reduce littering, and might even encourage people, as someone will pick it up. But then, I was also one of those moms who made my boys pick up their own room, no matter how much it bothered me, it was their opala not mine. [
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