There’s more trash around town than meets the eye.
You find out when you spend an hour pitching in on the Community Cleanup.
On the north side of Lutak Road between Young Road and Picture Point, I filled a large yellow litter bag with chunks of Styrofoam, broken windshield wipers, a ball cap, bottles and cans, plastic bags, candy wrappers, casings of spent fireworks, and five arranged sorbent towels where apparently a car had flipped and a public-minded official sought to catch spilled oil before it flowed into Lynn Canal.
We’re a fishing community and we owe our livelihood and sockeye dinners to waters clean enough for growing healthy fish.
We’ve learned in recent years that our fish are filling up with micro-plastics from trash breaking down into tiny bits in our bays and inlets. If we don’t want to eat plastic, we need to keep it out of our ditches. Except for people on mountaintops, we all live downstream.
In the ditches on Saturday, there weren’t as many cigarette butts as we used to see. And the guy who threw airline-sized liquor bottles on my wife’s property for years apparently has moved, died or gone on the wagon. Both good news.
About 35 years ago, TV actress Stephanie Powers came to Haines to shoot a wildlife special about our bald eagle congregation. After she had spent a day in the eagle preserve, I asked her about her experience. The roadside was full of trash and litter, she said. She was gobsmacked.
Besides voting, the most basic act of citizenship is picking up trash and litter around your property. I know you didn’t put it there. The wind, some drunk or an ignorant kid left it there. But it doesn’t matter.
The trash is there. And it’s unsightly. It doesn’t look good on you and it’s embarrassing for the rest of us.
If you helped out during Saturday’s annual Community Cleanup, thank you. Thanks also to the Haines Chamber of Commerce for making the cleanup happen.