River of Trash
Citizens, neighbors and stewards of the land and waterways, WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM! (That’s a collective “WE”) The above photograph is not intended to make you smile; it is intended to call attention to something all too many of us are guilty of putting up with and allowing to happen, if not actually contributing to it – the strewing of trash in our outdoor environment.
The dog in the photo is “Pip,” a one year old puppy whose daily world includes a 100 foot stretch of shore three miles down from town on the Damariscotta River in the background. Like most dogs, he’s very interested in the stuff he encounters on his rounds, and since the day we got him he has shown particular interest in sticks, hunks of wood, dried kelp, old horseshoe crabs . . . and manmade trash. He really has a yen for plastics and rubbery things, styrofoam and hunks of rope – anything he can carry or drag. And where does he take all of his treasures? Up onto our lawn, where he gnaws them and chews them, often into tens and hundreds of pieces. That the trash was there along our shore was no news to me; two or three times a year, for years, I’ve collected what I can carry in a couple of big buckets. There has always been enough to fill them to overflowing. And for the better part of a year now, Pip has been collecting too.
A few weeks ago, I decided to get a measure of how much trash this dog was dragging home, and I saved about two weeks’ worth for this photo, although several hundred tiny chewed bits got left out of the shot, and there’s still a lot of stuff he hasn’t collected yet. You will see quite a few plastic bottles, oil containers, PVC pipe, hunks of rope, a 5 gallon bucket lid, aluminum cans, plastic strapping and bags, six-pack harnesses, styrofoam cups, a fiberglass panel of some sort, a floating oyster cage and several messy chunks of foam flotation from other such cages and, as always, a preponderance of the quintessential blue rubber gloves worn by diggers of clams and worms. As a friend pointed out, most of the items there could be called “discretionary litter” – in other words, DELIBERATELY DISCARDED . . . and picked up by one small dog on just 100 feet of shore.
If the photo doesn’t shock you a bit, think of this: From the Damariscotta town landing to a point just south of Christmas Cove there is over 60 miles of shoreline along the river (including islands). Do the math: 60 miles x 5280 feet/mile = 316,800 feet. 316,800 ÷ Pip’s 100 feet of shore = 3,168. Multiply what you see in the above image x 3,168. That’s just the Damariscotta River, which most of us like to think of as clean and relatively unspoiled. There’s a lot more shoreline out there and beyond where the same problem is ongoing. I wish there were a way to soften the message, but there isn’t. It’s bad. We’ve got to change our ways.