Take Me to Your Litter
Earth Day 1996, and what an embarrassment of riches to choose from.
Should I join the schoolchildren at West Hollywood’s drought-tolerant demonstration garden? Good to learn early that lush greenswards aren’t a native look, or a cheap one, and almost every drop of water that’s swigged or sprinkled or showered in this island city is an import--from France by the ounce, from the local mountains by the gallon, from Northern California or the Colorado River by the acre-foot.
The Lang Oak celebration in Encino looked enticing--a coast live oak that was a sapling when William the Conqueror earned his nickname. To find old trees around here, you must look hard--and look fast. They are being whacked down for development at a rate that would make a clear-cutter blush.
Oh yes, the 27th Earth Day offered an embarrassment of riches. Even a tanker truck ferrying thousands of gallons of oil down the Century Freeway obligingly spilled only about a hundred of them when it smacked into a Mercury Sable.
Earth Day plus one offered only embarrassment. I awoke to the laboring whine of trash trucks, loading up the day’s urban haul, another 7 million pounds. Then on my way to work, I saw a car parked at the curb. The driver wasn’t furtive or hurried. He was simply dumping his car’s litter into the public street.
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On Earth Day, I chose the ocean option, where more than a thousand schoolchildren from landlocked towns like Palmdale and Bell Gardens and Whittier would be tidying up about three miles of beach.
What bookends this beach is critical to the life of the beach itself. At the southern end, in El Segundo, stands the Hyperion Treatment Plant, into whose premises flow 330 million gallons of raw sewage every day. Until nine years ago, a lot of that just got dumped into the ocean as untreated sludge, a Dickensian word that sounds exactly like what it is.
At the other end, just south of Marina del Rey, is the Ballona wetlands, a relic among the vanishing coastal marshes that once fed and nurtured birds and fish and plants by the millions. A wetlands is a factory of nature. Part of this one is destined to become another kind of factory--DreamWorks, a movie production facility.
To the subteen schoolkids who erupted onto the sand with plastic bags and cotton gloves, the beach didn’t look like a trash dump landscaped with two-liter bottles and soda cans. Scavengers and beach groomers had already culled most of those. The foam and paper and plastic discards were usually quite small, the size of a quarter.
In gloved fingers, a girl picked up a cigarette butt--L.A.’s most common beach detritus, as if the coast were a hotel ashtray. She showed it to her friends. Her giggling horror was aesthetic: “Can you believe this color lipstick?”
If a TV camera lens swung their way, they tidied like mad. A few wrote their names in the sand among the dog prints and gull prints. They could identify the fast-food source of each fragment of plastic foam and paper wrappers as if they were flash cards.
What does Earth Day advance if on Earth Night, the same youngster who laboriously collected other people’s throwaways doesn’t give a thought to the environmental consequences of ordering a fast-food meal encased in paper and plastic, or missing the three-point shot to the trash can?
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Epiphanies can often accomplish what sober instruction cannot. Ask a man named Saul of Tarsus, turned on the road to Damascus to another path. Ask anyone who’s been turned from meat by the terror and pain of a slaughterhouse.
If Earth Day were mine to design, it would start not on the beach, but next door, at the Hyperion plant, tracking the 75 or 100 gallons each of us--with every flush of a toilet, every tap left running--sends into the sewers daily.
After a trek through the unmarked mountain range of the Lopez Canyon landfill, to which each of us adds two pounds a day, we would tour our own trash cans, finding paper and plastic that can be recycled instead of dumped, and bottles of nail polish and bug spray and model paint that are hazardous waste, not mere trash.
We would go shopping, to discern the wastefully over-packaged half-ounce of face cream enticingly presented in two ounces of vivid paper. We would find out just what is at stake when the clerk asks, “Paper or plastic?”
Or maybe I’d just turn it over to Arlene Soto to run.
She is 10 years old, a fourth-grader at Suva Elementary School in Bell Gardens, and where some of her schoolmates at the beach cleanup were employing their trash bags as parachutes or superhero capes, she was solemn. Her job was to record each bit of trash.
“Birds feed trash to their babies. They don’t know it isn’t food.” She marked down another piece of plastic. “I just don’t know why people do that [litter]. Even pigs don’t do that.”
It is called Earth Day, not Human Day, for we need the earth more than it needs us. The earth reminds us of that every few heartbeats, as the ocean’s noise and froth rolls in, as it has for longer even than there have been heartbeats to count it.
