Living with litter

Saturday, April 19, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.

Imagine standing at an ocean’s shoreline and watching the waves as they come in around your ankles — and looking down and seeing cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic forks, grocery bags, bottles, cans, coffee-cup lids ...

This is not a scene you’ll find on any travel poster. Only when you get to the beach will you see what it has become.

Some beaches are worse than others, but worldwide many are becoming huge outdoor trash cans.

This was proved one day in September when the nonprofit advocacy group Ocean Conservancy held its annual International Coastal Cleanup. The group, founded in 1972 and based in Washington, D.C., sent legions of volunteers to 33,000 miles of shoreline and waterways in 76 countries. Their mission: To pick up and catalog all the trash they could find in one day.

This week Ocean Conservancy released the numbers: 7.2 million pieces of trash were bagged. Together they weighed more than 6 million pounds. Each of the 378,000 volunteers, on average, collected 182 pounds of trash for every mile of shoreline, which included inland lakes and streams.

Volunteers in the United States traversed 10,110 shoreline miles — about one-third of the worldwide total. But they averaged 390 pounds of trash per mile while picking up almost 4 million pounds — two-thirds of the worldwide total.

This is a sad commentary on how we live in this country, whether at the beach or elsewhere. Littering has become a way of life. We rose above that in the 1960s, under the leadership of Lady Bird Johnson, whose “Keep America Beautiful” campaign inspired a nationwide consciousness about the importance of a clean environment.

Today we can’t walk out of our homes without seeing litter. Fast-food containers and other trash are tossed on our streets by people who must not care how it might assault someone’s senses or harm the urban wildlife. We see litter in the desert, washes, public parks — everywhere.

Let’s again rise above this mentality.