<p>I’m taking a walk in the woods and as I cross the bridge over the stream I look down and see a small, brown, glass bottle beached on a sandbar. I scramble down into the streambed, wade across, and pick up the bottle. Then I look upstream and see something bright yellow in the water. Walking through the shallows, I soon reach the object. It’s a large, plastic, jug-like container. There’s no telling what it once contained, since immersion has removed its label, and if it held something toxic the substance is now in my pond, where unsuspecting herons, kingfishers, mergansers, and osprey are eating the contaminated fish. I remove the yellow container from the water and add it to a pile of similar objects awaiting proper disposal.</p>
<p>I used to think that littering and dumping was an urban problem. Since coming to live in the countryside, I have discovered the problem is universal. In the countryside, it seems there is a long-standing tradition of making your trash somebody else’s concern. Who wants to go to the trouble and expense of hauling hazardous waste to the county dump, or of buying a permit to put an extra bag of household waste at the kerb, when trash can so easily be thrown off the back of a pickup truck into the ditch or onto the side of the road? Or even better, into a ravine that abuts an uninhabited side-road, where out-of-sight is out-of-mind?</p>
<p>The ravine is in one of the farthest, most inaccessible parts of my property. When I eventually found a way up the brush-choked valley to the point where the stream ran close to the road, I beheld a horror. The precipitous slope between the road and the stream is covered in old tires, rusting barrels, construction waste, and ripped-open garbage bags. Down in the water are household appliances and fittings, paint cans, buckets, more garbage bags, and unidentifiable machine parts. This is the mother-lode. When the stream is running strongly in the spring thaw or after heavy rains, it picks up the lighter bits of trash and sends them on a journey, and then downstream I collect up the disposable cutlery, beer cans, light bulbs, and plastic bottles bobbing along in the water or caught up in snags. The contaminants leaching out of rusting barrels and open containers are unfortunately invisible and non-removable.</p>
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