“Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest.” says Charles Moore at the start of this shocking tale of the throwaway lifestyle we were taught to live after the Great Depression. Today, as the pendulum swings back the other way, we like to think that we control the impact on our immediate environment by carefully recycling the plastics which get trucked out of Town. Out of sight and now disposed of properly in the provided receptacle, it’s simply not enough.
If you can bear it, take a moment to watch the TED talk about the impact of our poor human behavior on the children of the shores of another nation thousands of miles away and also understand that this trash ends up in the belly of the wild fish we like to eat. It’s truly sobering.
Watch it first and then be thankful for the hundreds of privately owned waterfront properties in the Town of Southold, New York, whose owners are picking up just this kind of trash every day. They not only clean their own property, but also below the high water mark and into the shallows, removing plastic trash that the public never sees as it is swiftly removed before the next tide has chance to take it out again, or snag a bird. I thought abandoned fishing line was the worst of it, the brightly colored bottle caps rather unsightly, but innocuous. Not so.
Next time you see some elderly person waving madly at you to get off their “private beach”, and your response is to position yourself firmly to the spot waving the “Public Trust” document madly back, spare a thought. This owner may be one of those who has been a willing and unpaid clean up crew of our shoreline for decades, they and their immediate neighbors, who continue to pick up the trash, week after week, year after year, haul it to the dump, get it weighed and pay for it out of pocket. Which as anyone who has turned up at a Town Beach clean ups knows, cannot be a trivial amount over a lifetime of ownership.
Can you imagine the state of affairs around our shorelines if the owners suddenly stopped cleaning it up en mass? Those among us who imagine a better Southold if only all the pesky private property owners might go away and leave it all to the Town ought to be careful what they wish for. Paying for the privilege of doing daily trash cleanup over a number of years and decades takes a special kind of person. Everyone else either doesn’t do any beach cleanup at all, or only after themselves at best, or a couple of times a year at the Town beaches when called upon. You’ll always find waterfront property owners helping out at the Town beaches as well, because they understand only too well what a big job it is going to be.
This is one instance where waterfront owners in Southold Town are neither part of the problem, nor part of the solution. They are the whole solution.
And I’m curious. Do any of the Long Island vineyards and wineries use plastic corks? I can just imagine a fair number of those ending up in our waters this summer.
Joanna Lane
as always, a personal opinion
Flickr photo by Gribiche
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