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My kids and I have been the neighborhood clean up crew for 15 years or so. It started with them on my back in a pack and me dragging a garbage bag along and picking up stuff myself, to the now more efficient method where I walk with the bag and they run and fetch the garbage.
We walk about a 3 mile stretch of road. Sometimes more.
I have noticed that the amount of trash people toss out their window seems to be increasing over time. I see it driving wherever I go. Maybe it’s a southern thing?
The first step towards an ecological consciousness is probably the decision to not throw your crap on the ground. It seems these days, in the news, that the environment is definitely taking a back seat. A way back seat. And I see the results of that thinking on the side of the road.
Seems to me we bowhunters should care especially much about the environment, and litter too.
Clubs could do the “adopt a highway” thing.
I am going to suggest it to our state bowhunting organization.
Bowhunters like us have an extra responsibility, born of our mindfulness of the ways of nature, to minimize our impact.
“Leave only footprints” should be more than just a motto.
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Steve,
When whatever snow we get here melts away a thin white line of litter is revealed along the roadways. It’s an amazing array of stuff from the new world tumble weeds of plastic bags to fast food containers and bottles of pee and various car parts. It’s not just in the south. Pennsylvania can be a dumpster. I’ll be taking a walk with a couple of bags to do an extended pick-up here, along with the weekly, sometimes daily, trash pick up right in front of my house.
You make good points. I can get pretty upset that some turds throw their crap out, but I’d rather pick it up than stay mad.
Good post, thanks, david
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Good post Steve.
It’s not always the slobs on the road either. Every year in the fall our local scout group has an archery function at our range.
I set targets for them (we had 52 boys shooting :D:D last fall )and the boys always help me take them down and put them up.
The scouts also have a policy of leaving a place cleaner than they found it and they did so at the range.
To make a long story short, I was embarrassed way bad last year (this year I will make it a point to go out a day early and empty the trash can), the trash cans were overflowing with beer bottles and beer cans. Plastic water bottles and plastic wrappers everywhere. I hadn’t been out there in awhile as I’d been hunting and thus didn’t know how bad things were.
I ain’t gonna say where all that comes from but I will say that our trad group doesn’t gather up at the practice bails and shoot dots for hours at a time. Nuff said on that.
Any way, slobs not only travel the roads, they take their slobbing with them wherever they go. .
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Good Post!!!!
Every time I go stumping (try to make it twice a week) I come home with a bag full of beer cans and mylar balloons. Yes, mylar balloons. The kids let go of the string, they float away, and have to come down some where.
Most of the fly fishermen I know carry some kind of bag for trash each time they go out, and it always comes home full. Good public relations when the land owner sees you dragging the trash out of his woods.
This is the kind of thing that grows a little piece at a time, the best way to fight it is a little piece at a time. 😉
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We have an annual event down here called the Great Garbage Gig-Off….people with boats will cruise the Black and Current Rivers and the boat that collects the most garbage (by weight) wins…You can see these people out there with their 20 foot long gigs retrieving beer cans etc. off of the river bottoms.
I like to hunt some walk-in only areas in the Mark Twain Forest and I have brought back plastic water bottles and candy wrappers many times from very deep woods…if ya pack it in, pack it out. And yep, I’ve seen more than a few of those Mylar balloons and strangely enough, plastic Wal-Mart bags in the woods.
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R2, you’re an artist! love it, dwc
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It is definitely not a southern thing. When I moved to Alaska in 1980 I was utterly appalled by the amount of trash along the road south from Anchorage to my new home on the Kenai Peninsula. I’d never seen anything like it. Fortunately this has improved, as wiser heads began to realize the impact this could have on the tourist trade, which is a big deal up north. People don’t go to Alaska to see beer bottles piled up beside the road. Lori and I still routinely pick up litter wherever we go, particularly off-road. But that isn’t enough. Peer pressure is the only longterm solution to the problem. I apply it whenever I can. Don
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So here’s the specific suggestion I made to the NCBA:
Invite member clubs to “adopt-a-highway”. The DMV will post a sign that shows the clubs name and the NCBA. In return, the NCBA will pay for the clubs liability insurance for every year the club maintains the road.
Good for the road, good advertising for the club and the NCBA, and good PR for bowhunters in general.
The NCBA has a bunch of money ear-marked for conservation and bowhunting defense. It never gets used ’cause they can’t figure out what to do with it. The Liability insurance is cheap, so it’s a good investment.
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Paleoman–There is a difference between litter and junk! Nobody ever throws anything away in Alaska. You never know when you might need the gear from a wrecked 1958 Super Cub. The best you can hope for is that the piles stay in the owners’ yards. Don
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