I was walking in a State Park with my children, when we came upon a pile of garbage.  Ironically, it was in the same clearing as a “No Dumping” sign.  I’ve come across garbage dumps in public spaces a lot.  It made me think about how things get cleaned up.

The County has a website full of information on how to report illegal dumping of solid or hazardous waste on the ground or in the water.  The website basically boils down to, you have to make a phone call.  Now, if the illegal garbage dump is in the biggest city in the County, you can actually report it on an online portal.  This isn’t the case if you happen to see the garbage dumped outside of that one big city.  I’m curious whether these garbage dumps ever get reported, and if they do, exactly how many years it takes before the County decides that it has enough funds or manpower to actually clean them up.

This line of thought usually leads down the road to my issues with authority.  Would it be better to have an open and transparent online list of illegal garbage dump sites, that interested parties, like Boy Scout troops, or churches, or motorcycle gangs, could go and pick up and haul to an actual garbage dump, paying the dump fees themselves?  Would the cloud of people in the community do better at cleaning their environment if given the opportunity?  Not if they think that the government must do it, or if they think that they must find the person to blame first.

The first issue is that the people who have skin in the game, who actually walk their dogs in the park and like to keep it clean, are not government bureaucrats who sit in offices all day.  Governments are not motivated to clean up garbage piles, unless there is a big public health problem involved, or unless it impacts their paycheck.  They don’t really have skin in the game.

The second issue, is the blame game.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we all knew who made the mess?  Still, even knowing who did it, this doesn’t mean that the person who made the mess has the power or motivation to clean it up.  As a parent, I cleaned up the bodily fluids and waste of newborn babies all the time, constantly, day and night.  I cleaned up vomit from the floor.  I am constantly cleaning up messes that I did not make, all the time, even while knowing exactly who made them.  Sometimes it is because babies can’t change their own diapers.  Sometimes, it is because the household runs well if somebody does all the dishes instead of everybody doing their own for every meal.  Sometimes, I will never know who made the mess.  I will never know which construction person built my front porch in a rainy climate out of non-treated wood, which rotted through.  Nevertheless, I have the skin in the game, so I clean up the messes that impact me the most.

Now, expand that example out further.  There are bigger messes out there in the world, which need cleaning up, besides your childhood bedroom.  Some of them are local, like all of those Halloween candy wrappers you find along sidewalks, or the edge of soccer fields, or in local parks which take almost no effort to bend down and pick up and dispose of properly.  Some of them, are a whole lot bigger, like the great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.  Sometimes, the person who made the mess is long dead, so beating their dead corpse just isn’t effective and getting the messes cleaned up, now is it?  Sometimes, the messes you need to clean up are not actually physical, but mental, or even metaphorical.  Sometimes it really is your parents’ fault that you feel the way you do about yourself and your potential.  Nonetheless, you are the one with skin in the game; you are the one with the power of your own two hands, and the vision of a better world than the messy one you see.  You are the one who, with the help of your friends, can clean up a mess that you stumble across today, no matter how small or large, and no matter who made it.  Even if you only make a tiny dent in it, you’ll feel just that little bit more powerful over your world.