June 23, 2026

"Readin' the classics and pickin' up plastics: Litterature."

I'm a big fan of volunteer litter picker uppers, and why wouldn't it entail reading the classics? 12 more episodes: here.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 8:55 AM
Tags: , ,

5 comments:

Jamie said...

In the Toronto neighborhood where we've been living for the past three weeks, litter is everywhere. This was also true in one of the London neighborhoods where we lived just after college, on student work visas: a commuting neighborhood for what Americans would call the (probably lower) middle class (I've never been clear on how American people's use of "middle class" differs from English people's), with many newish immigrants. This Toronto neighborhood also has young professionals, but I'd say it's largely the same demographic as that long-ago London one.

Anyway. Trash everywhere. I've finally started picking up the less gross stuff and depositing it in the ubiquitous litter bins, grumbling to myself all along about "five steps, they only would have had to take five steps." The classics have not entered my mind.

It seems to me that you can accurately gauge average neighborhood income by measuring amount of trash. I'm not sure why. I do know that it's not because higher-income neighborhoods have trash elves who pick up after the littering rich. So why, in lower-income areas, do people just crumple their sandwich wrappers and drop them on the ground instead of holding them for the five more steps to get to the bin?

TL;DR - richer people aren't rich just because of goodd luck. In some way(s), they're different from poorer people. The social-engineering questions are, can that difference be taught, and is it causative?

6/23/26, 9:25 AM
Anthony said...

I live in a semi-upscale gated place (AZ) and I and others have gone on informal Litter Patrols. Might be because it trends to older residents. Not as much lately, because the new landscaping company we hired is better about picking stuff up.

6/23/26, 10:27 AM
Levi Starks said...

On days when my wife and I choose to walk instead of going to the gym we carry Walmart bags and pick up trash from the surrounding community. Our 50 home HOA community has virtually no trash as you might expect. However the larger 1sq mile neighborhood built in the 70's is a different story, when we started doing this a year ago we were easily filling multiple bags every walk, but now we're down to only an occasional fast food bag or water bottle. and someone who seems to be consuming a fifth of generic vodka while driving and tossing the empty plastic bottle at least once a week.
It's my belief that the broken window policing concept will, over time cause people to be more compliant because who want's to be the first person to throw out trash in an otherwise clean community.

6/23/26, 11:37 AM
mikee said...

While living in Baltimore in the 1990s I learned that the fastest way to get a corrupt city government to perform its basic functions - such as keeping a neighborhood park mowed and cleaned up - was to have a newly formed neighborhood group officially offer to take over those duties from the overstretched (or damned incompetent) Parks Department. The very day after that letter was hand delivered to the city office, half a dozen City workers mowed & cleaned our neighborhood park, and even painted the swings for the first time in about a decade. Nothing scares the grifters more than the public stating out loud that it ain't that hard to replace them.

6/23/26, 1:04 PM
n.n said...

Fairly litter gardens.

6/23/26, 3:54 PM

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