As I drove down the motorway to sell to a corporate the benefits of cityhopping I passed a group of men on the side of the motorway picking up the litter that people must have chucked out their windows.
I thought what an essential job they do and wondered if they knew how many of us valued what they did to keep our place looking nicer. Later in the day I saw a man with a broom sweeping up some of the cigerette butts and other rubbish in the gutter. He was stopping these ‘nasties’ going into the waterways and polluting our water for all of us – let alone what those toxic butt ends do to sea life. I hope he knew how important he was to all of us.
Later today I got an email reminder from a website, The Intenders . It wrote about how when Native Amercan Indians left a place where they had been living regardless of whether it was overnight or over the season, you couldn’t even tell they had been there.
They cleaned up after THEMSELVES! What if we all learned to clean up behind ourselves? We’ve all heard the stories of the joy people experience when they move house and find the previous owners have left it thoroughly clean and feeling fresh.
The Intenders points out that leaving our environment as clean as we found it is a trait that’s largely been forgotten in our world today.
But we are all leaving the Earth to our children. In today’s world we are good at making messes – environmental messes, economic, political and so on.
One thing we can all do is start to think about what mess are we contributing to? A salute to every cityhop member who is doing their bit towards cleaner air on our planet. Cityhop members are contributing to a more sustinable planet. And a salute to all those who aren’t afraid to picking up the scraps of paper and cans and plastic out on the street and put it in a bin.
As the Intenders site suggests, some of the greatest heros of our time are the ones you see with black plastic bags slung over their shoulders, walking along the streets, roads, beaches, and byways bending over and picking up the trash.
We all notice when there is a mess around. How many of us do something about it?
What if when we bend over to pick up a some rubbish from the pavement we were putting something back into the Earth bank!
Radical? Who cares? At least we would have a more pleasant environment to enjoy. As the slogan says we can all play our part!
