SEPTEMBER 17, a Saturday, is International Coastal Cleanup, and I’m pretty sure that, as in previous years, hundreds of businesses, community groups and residents will participate. Littering and illegal dumping were “major concerns” on island in the Trust Territory and early Commonwealth eras, and, most likely, during the immediate post-war years. Saipan’s infamous Puerto Rico dumpsite was where the U.S. military dumped scrap metal, and it was during the U.S. Naval administration when that area became a municipal waste disposal site.
And yet even back then, as Marianas Variety’s old news stories would attest, island residents, young and old as well as the occasional visitors, conducted regular cleanups including on Managaha and the Grotto even before there was a local tourism industry. The government would pass anti-littering laws and talk big about “stricter enforcement” but that has yet to happen. Recently, they came up with another grandiose (i.e., good-luck-with-that) “solution” — “universal garbage collection — which would be implemented, for a fee, by the same big and overreaching government that cannot enforce its anti-littering law (never mind the laws against blighted properties or curfew hours for minors, among other statutes).
Meanwhile, businesses, community groups and other members of the community spend their own time and money in cleaning up public areas, especially tourist sites. And they’re not even running for office. They just do it because they can, and they believe they should, and they’re right.
Ryan Holiday once asked himself, “How many times do I have to walk past this litter…before I am complicit in its existence?”
A young and brilliant best-selling author, Holiday lives on a ranch in Bastrop County, Texas. Married and with two sons, he appreciates an older, simpler way of life, but he said his experience walking, running, biking and driving on a rural country road was unpleasant. “People,” he added, “dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump illegal deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.”
Of course he was outraged. “It made me angry at humanity and the place that I lived,” he said. “I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians — of course, they did nothing. I put up cameras which did nothing. I despaired about the climate and the future. I thought about moving.”
But then he realized that even if he moved “it would still be happening here.” A modern Stoic, he recalled the following quotation from the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius: “You can also commit injustice by doing nothing.”
Holiday decided to clean up the mess wherever he found it. “The tires went into the back of my truck — and I paid to have them properly recycled. I was down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles and plastic bags. I tossed countless nails and screws into the trash. I have put on face masks and gloves and scooped up dead goats, a dead calf and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place.”
He said the experience wasn’t pleasurable, “but it was empowering.”
The Stoics, he added, “would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better — whether we complain or just get to work.”
A few years ago, he said he and his family spent some time at the beach. “My kids were excited to play in the ocean and to build sand castles and have ice cream, of course. Yet they seemed to have the most fun running up and down the empty beach in the morning — unprompted by me — picking up trash left by the beach goers the day before and asking for my help lifting them up so they could put it in those paper bag trash cans that the county puts up every few hundred yards.”
Holiday said he posted about it on Instagram, and it eventually became a viral Facebook post as well as a global challenge with a #TrashTag hashtag. Now, he said, you “can see people cleaning up a beach in Mumbai, filling up dumpsters full of trash in Kansas City, and collecting garbage in Vietnam.”
Holiday said one of his readers “emailed me a little while back to tell me about how his picking up trash spread locally. In his townhome community, there’s a trash dumping problem. ‘It was driving me mad,’ he wrote. He put up cameras to try to catch offenders. He stayed up late to see if he could run them off. Then he came across the video I made and instead of policing his area, he began cleaning it up. ‘I saw it rub off on some of my neighbors and family,’ he said. And now, the number of neighbors picking up trash outnumbers the number of neighbors dumping trash.”
Sounds like Saipan.
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