Editorial: Clean, green boast a load of rubbish

Opinion

For those who cling fondly to the delusion that New Zealand has an environment as pristine as the image promoted to tourists, this week's most depressing news must have been the report that volunteers in the most remote area of Fiordland have collected more than 100 truckloads of rubbish. Cricket balls sat alongside Barbra Streisand CDs on the isolated beaches.

Exercises by volunteers in the Hauraki Gulf have produced similar mountains of muck. The bulk of that rubbish is borne in from the sea and marine detritus can be found on atolls miles from anywhere. Yet clean-up campaigns far from the coast yield abundant harvests that testify that far from being clean and green many New Zealanders are heedless scatterers of trash. Only our meagre population density prevents the landscape from disappearing under a layer of landfill.

Visit almost any of our cherished tourist attractions and even if the sweepers have done their duty you can guarantee that lurking in the bushes or just over the edge is a rich deposit of bottles, plastic bags, hamburger boxes and chip containers.

Pull into the first picnic spot outside any rural town and there will be a pile of assorted evidence that human browsers have munched this way.

There is, admittedly, the problem that modern packaging is excessive both in its multi-layers and in its durability but the real problem is that people just don't care.

It's not just seafarers who find it more convenient to dump unwanted items overboard. There is something bizarre about walking behind a shopper lugging a basket full of cleaning products for her spotless home while her toddler carpets the street with lolly wrappers.

The sight of a car window being wound down to allow the jettisoning of surplus cargo is commonplace and it is not just foolish young people bombing their Big Mac packages.

The middle-aged car lover who is out with his hose and chamois leather every weekend often decides he can't have an untidy interior and so biffs out all the litter in the regional park's parking lot. The ARC parks have nice polite posters thanking you for taking your rubbish home. Regrettably many don't.

The explanation might be a view that public litter is someone else's problem. "It's the council's job to keep the streets clean, isn't it?" seems to be the unspoken assumption. It is the epitome of J.K. Galbraith's "private affluence and public squalor".

Try to suggest to a litterer that he or she ought to keep hold of their trash and dispose of it appropriately and the response is likely to be, at worst, expletive-laden advice on the virtues of minding your own business or, more likely, complete incomprehension. They just don't get it. "What is wrong with throwing rubbish away?"

But there is something wrong with the volunteers of Fiordland having to spend 10 days a year laboriously picking up other people's leavings. The effort ought to be going not into clean-ups but in paying much more attention to the education message.

The child hurling the fried chicken package away should have been so indoctrinated by parents, teachers and public campaigns that their hand freezes in mid-air, a conditioned reflex preventing them from letting go.

Then perhaps we could go back to skiting to foreigners about our unspoiled land.