Cleaning Up

A black sock, a capped syringe, a hub cap, an old jumper – these are some of the things I made acquaintance with last Sunday. And there was some plastic too – endless shreds of plastic bags and bits of bottles.

I and about half a dozen other keen souls spent two hours picking up rubbish along the Darebin Creek in Melbourne as part of Clean Up Australia Day. The experience gives you insight into our throwaway society and why essentially, despite years of environmental warnings, we still don’t value the planet. It also shows how small groups of people continue to respect and nurture the earth year after year in unassuming ways.   

As I and my partner unwrapped the plastic that had twirled around a sheoak, joggers and power walkers passed by barely looking in our direction. For something as important as cleaning up the detritus of society so that nature can live, there were precious few of us doing it. I wondered why. But for a couple of pamphlets I’d seen by the creek, I wouldn’t have known Clean Up Australia Day was on. I hadn’t seen anything about it in the media. The Clean Up Australia organisers have said there were 591,400 volunteers across the country this year – that’s great, but there need to be a lot more. Why aren’t masses of people involved in looking after our parks and bush? Why is it not made compulsory for everybody, once a year, to clean up their patch? Think global, act local.

As a society we’ve improved immensely since the appalling times of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries when industrial and household waste was routinely dumped into rivers and creeks. Nowadays natural areas are preserved and maintained, with taxpayer dollars, to a certain level of health. But to see the miles of plastic tangled up in tree branches, the cans, bottles and Styrofoam cups washed up in the creek, is to realise we have a long way still to go. The truth is that urbanisation is a barrier for most people caring for the environment. Most of us living in the city are psychologically disconnected from the natural processes of earth, air and water. We are typically not involved in rearing the plants and animals we eat – we don’t know how to look after soil so that it’s productive, how the balance of clean air and water supports all the organisms necessary for life. We live in a bubble, buying from supermarkets as if our sustenance came like manna from heaven. And the waste created by our lifestyle simply piles up in landfill and is washed into waterways to find its way into the ocean.

Most of us don’t truly inhabit the place where we live. How many people can name the trees and other plants in their neighbourhood? How many people would know, for instance, what medicinal or other properties they might have? The solution is to metaphorically de-urbanise the city; to reconnect with the processes of nature so that we are conscious of our part in the great web of relationships that is life; to rediscover place and be responsible participants in our environment, not tourists or passive consumers. Some people are engaged in this rediscovery – many local environment groups have been quietly working for years; there are Transition Town groups which try to integrate communities with their local environments; there are people involved in permaculture and community gardens; even the proliferation of farmers’ markets is a sign of a greater respect and desire for locality. The shift is happening, but still at the edges.   

One simple but powerful step forward in mainstream society would be container deposit legislation. The federal Environment Department estimated in 2010 that 10 billion plastic and glass bottles are sold each year in Australia. If 10 cents could be retrieved for every bottle across the country and not just in South Australia and the Northern Territory, it would go some way to reducing the enormous volume of litter. In Victoria while in opposition, the Coalition said it would introduce container deposit laws, but now in government it has backed away. It shows that the quantum leap from the consciousness of local environment groups to society at large has not yet been made, otherwise politicians would have acted decisively on the issue. Cleaning up Australia is a long work in progress and it starts with each of us getting our hands dirty for the land we love.