Saving the Planet, Picking Up Trash

WHEN I WAS a freshman in high school in 1969, I joined an organization called "The Ecology Club". We had more than a thousand students in our high school, and as I recall quite a few student clubs and organizations. Nowadays, the term ecology" almost seems a bit outdated; don't we call it "environmental science" now? We met once a week before school in a classroom. The group included a couple of upper classmen and a teacher sponser. We talked, maybe about the bad things in the environement, of which in those days there were many, just like these days. In those days lakes and rivers were on fire, and Los Angeles was rarely visible from the ground. The sponsoring teacher suggested projects, one of which was to clean up the garbage in one of our town's public parks, near teh netracne of a cave,as I recall. The amount of trash was considerable, mostly cups, bottles, cans and cigarette butts, and the work was hard and took awhile. Nowadays I notice, though I almost wish I didn't, that everywhere I the moment I lave the city and limits nd enter rurul country, the scenery is littered with all this garbage along the roads and highways. A lot of plastic items and cardboard boxes too. We Americans need to do more than to put "Don't Be A Litterbug" ads on TV. (I'm not even sure whether we do that anynore). We need to do more than send out brigades of black and white striped or orange clad prisoners to pick up the trash. Wat we need to do, I'm sure all will agree, is to pick it up ourselves, or better yet, to stop tossing it out our car windows in the first place.In this regard, as in any others, we Americans need to be more like Europeans, who keep their highways clean. Itmay well be that for the most part, all across America's fruited plain, from sea to shining sea, our landscape is slicker than a whistle, garbage wise. But not where I live, in the lower midwest. Where I live, we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to doin the atmosphere and oceans as well, work which, by all indications, is starting to get done. Much of it, including plastic pollution in our brains, bodies, oceans, and soil, masss extinctions and so forth, might indeed be irreversible. But maybe not. Sometimes it almost seems as if the human species is a plague upon an otherwise pristine planet. I think of all the plastic I have used and failed to recycle for lack of any opportunity to do so. The purely ornamental packaging we smugly rip apart and throw away into our bursting land fills. The waste. There are indications that we the human race can indeed develop and deploy the technologies necessary to cleanse our brains, bodies, and bloodstreams of plastic and other toxins, can rid the Earth's oceans of them, and the soil as well. Also, indications that we can implement the carbon sequestration process that will finally clean the carbon out of the atmosphere, end global warming, which in 1969 we hadn't even heard of yet, and restore the good health of the entire planetary ecosystem. But we all know that we nust hurry, which is why the utter lack of any environmental policies on the part of the Trump administration is absolutely disastrous, and must be reversed immediately. At seventy, I still stoop to grab a handful of somebody else's garbage, from time to time. My fourteen year old self, back in nineteen sixty nine saving the planet with my classmates would probably have been amazed to learn that he would still be doing the same thing, by necessity, more than half a century later in a very distant, imperfect and disappointing future.