Garbage in Oklahoma: Another Message from Fluff

 

Hi. This is Fluff, a female cottonwood tree in Tulsa (she/hers). My thoughts are being passed on to you by a botanist named Stan Rice (he/him/his), who is the only human who stops to talk with me.

Right at the base of my trunk, the City of Tulsa has designated an area in which volunteers can place bags of trash. The volunteers can pick up pieces of garbage from the banks of Joe Creek, which is a drainage ditch near where I am growing, put them into plastic bags, and leave them for the city to pick up.

Joe Creek certainly needs the trash pickup. The banks of the creek are thick with garbage, most of which has floated in from upstream. Stan has estimated the number of pieces of garbage along Joe Creek. It is approximately one thousand pieces of garbage per mile. There is a similar density of garbage along the banks of the Arkansas River.

Stan has made over a hundred estimates of the number of garbage items, easily visible from an automobile, along Oklahoma highways. The number ranges from ten to a thousand, with the average being about a hundred, per mile. This means that, on a typical 200-mile drive through Oklahoma, you are likely to see twenty thousand pieces of garbage. No wonder Oklahoma has such a bad reputation, completely apart from the political news of…don’t get me started. Since Stan made so many estimates, it is not likely that bias (which I discussed in an earlier message) accounts for the results: Stan did not just see a trashy place and count the pieces of garbage. He made a systematic, unbiased survey.

Every once in a while, you will find plastic bags of garbage along the roadside in which volunteers have picked up garbage for the highway department to pick up. Once Stan even saw a man actually picking up garbage. But, from month to month and year to year, such acts seem to make very little difference in the amount of garbage along the road. The reason is the huge number of people who throw litter on the roadsides. While most people do not litter, a very large number of people do, and do so in huge amounts. One of the most common ways is that people pile light garbage in their pickup truck beds and drive along the highway, pretending to not notice that the garbage blows out of the truck bed.

And nearly all this garbage is recyclable. Not that it makes any difference right now; the City of Tulsa recycling facility is shut down due to a fire. Recyclables, put into separate bins by many conscientious homeowners, now gets mixed in with the regular garbage.

But I told Stan about another source of garbage along Joe Creek. Thieves break into houses and grab stuff to take with them. Later, they hide under the bridge and sort through it to find anything of value to them, whether it is costly items or pieces of information they can use for identity theft. They simply dump the remainder into the creek bed. Since I stand by the creek all day and all night, I have seen this happen. In addition, the homeless people gather garbage with which they construct shanties in which to live along the creek. Much of the garbage problem is also a crime problem, and a poverty problem. And a sanitation problem. It is not at all uncommon to see piles of human excrement on the path. Designating a place under a cottonwood tree for volunteers to place bags of trash will not solve these problems.

In addition, I told Stan that it is nearly inevitable that people will start bringing bags of household garbage to leave at this spot. The people who live in apartments have large dumpsters for their garbage, but these dumpsters are frequently overfilled. And then there is the stuff too big for dumpsters. Stan once saw a semi-truck fuel tank left at a recycling depot. I told Stan that the spot at the base of my trunk will quickly become a pile of junk. The location is easily accessible by truck, including pickup trucks that will bring in big pieces of junk to dump them.

The problem is that you Americans get, use, and throw away too much stuff, almost all of it in large packaging. The creek bed in my shadow is thickly studded with Styrofoam fragments. You don’t need all that stuff to be happy. Of course, what would you expect a cottonwood tree to say?

I produce a lot of leaf litter each autumn. But unlike industrial human litter, my leaves decay rapidly and help to build up the soil.

The City of Tulsa sign, beside my trunk, has been out for a couple of days and is already covered with graffiti. The city officials have good intentions, but what can they do against the mass of human filth?

There is so much garbage along the creekside path, including broken glass, that Stan doesn’t like to walk there anymore. But I hope that he comes along to say hello to me once in a while. Until next time, farewell from Fluff, the cottonwood tree.

Why I Cheered the Runners

I was about to leave my house and walk to my office one Saturday morning in October. I heard shouts outside and saw runners go down the street. (Not the sidewalk. In Durant, the sidewalks are in dangerous disrepair. So the street was closed by the police for the safety of the runners.) It was a community awareness and fundraising event. I did not know the background story of this event.

I still don’t. I decided that I did not need to know. The most important thing is, in my view, that this event was occurring at all. It was a wonderful example of altruism.

                                     

Altruism is where animals are nice to each other, and they both (or all) benefit from it. It is not necessarily self-sacrifice; it can be mutual benefit. And it is usually enjoyable. We humans not only have the instinct of being nice, but we enjoy it. The runners enjoyed running, their sponsors enjoyed donating money to the community benefit, and everyone enjoyed social interactions with their neighbors.

In Oklahoma, most people aren’t very good at altruism. Many of the Durant, Oklahoma altruists were involved in this event. But at least as many people in Durant are hostile toward altruism. They are hostile to their neighbors. They prefer to throw their garbage into their neighbors’ yards just to prove how hostile they are. (About ten percent of my garbage is what other people throw in my yard.)

So when I see altruism in action, I want to celebrate it. I was unprepared for this event, even though it went right past my front yard. But I stood out in the yard and clapped for the runners, none of whom I actually knew. And they thanked me. I got more “thank you” wishes in a half an hour than I usually get in a month.

Our Shared Environment

I am sure I have written about this idea previously: What we do to the environment of the Earth, locally or globally, is directly involved with how we relate to other people. How can we say we love our human brothers and sisters if we pollute the environment we share with them? Love your neighbor—and it is your neighbor’s Earth.

A particularly amazing example of the disregard that some people have for their neighbors, and their neighbors’ environment, has come to my attention in rural Oklahoma, where I live. When I first heard about it, I could hardly believe it, until it was corroborated by a second person. Both of these people, who do not know one another, grew up in and still live in rural Oklahoma. I still find it hard to believe, but I will pass the story on to you.

One way that some rural residents of Oklahoma have of getting rid of their garbage is to put it in the flatbed of a pickup truck and drive around until the wind blows it away. This does not work for heavy objects like beer bottles—those are more efficiently disposed of by throwing them out the window—but it works very well for paper and plastic. There are two reasons for this. First, Oklahoma has a lot of wind. Second, the air pressure is greater down in the pickup bed than in the moving air (moving, that is, relative to the pickup bed) above the pickup bed, virtually guaranteeing that the light garbage will be lifted out and blown away.

People who do this sort of thing might as well have a bumper sticker on the truck proclaiming, “This is what I think of you, you worthless miserable fellow Americans—I will dump my garbage on you.” Of course, they do not want to actually say this, so they pretend that, oh-oh, the wind just happened to lift the garbage out of my truck, oh well. Maybe they are even salving their own consciences by pretending that they are not really dumping their garbage when they do this.

As I said, I would not have believed this story had it not been told to me by two people who do not know one another or live in the same town.

Christians Think the Rest of Us Are Just Places to Pile Their Shit

My next door neighbors seemed to be the nicest Christian people in the world. They just had a baby, their firstborn, and have been cheerfully preparing their house to accommodate the new arrival. Derek Brewer is a realtor, just starting his own business. His wife Whitney was one our our brightest and smartest alumnae from Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

I counted myself really lucky to have them as neighbors, especially since we have a shared driveway. They are very quiet, even when they have a lot of visitors. Because I wanted to encourage them to stay, and not move away—nearly anybody who might move in after them would be worse, I figured—I have given them unlimited right to park in the shared driveway, half of which is mine, and I waived my right to park there.

Apparently I was a fool for trusting Christian goodness.

I generate very little garbage. I am proud of treading lightly upon God’s good green Earth. I do not use disposable dishes except when the alternative is very burdensome. And my lovely wife Lee spent many, many hours washing cloth diapers when Anita was young. (One of the pleasures of having an almost-28-year-old daughter is that it has been a long, long time since this was necessary.)

But when I did open my city garbage bin to put a tiny bit of refuse in it tonight, I found that it was almost completely filled by a big plastic garbage bag full of disposable plates and newborn diapers (used, of course). This bag was as much garbage as I generate in two months. I know where it must have come from. In order to put the garbage in my bin, one of them had to open my gate, walk across my back yard, and put it in, then walk back and close the gate. It could not have been a simple misunderstanding. Anyone stupid enough to do this by accident would not have been smart enough to open a gate.

I’m  tired of fundamentalist Christians treating everybody else in the world as places to pile their shit, and I mean this literally, or for target practice, or as scapegoats to blame everything on. If only us Democrat bleeding-hearts would get out of the world, all problems would be solved. For those of you who read this blog and think that maybe there is some way to reach some kind of mutual understanding with creationists, just remember that they have a fundamentally different worldview from the rest of us: they are the elect of God, and the rest of us are damned and worthless. Speaking as the president of Oklahoma Academy of Sciences (but not on behalf of the Academy), and as president-elect of Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (but not on their behalf either), I will not lift one finger to cooperate with creationists in any capacity.

It is, in itself, a small thing, since I generate so little garbage. I just wish they had ASKED first. But Christians don’t need to ask before dumping their shit on neighbors, or parking their cars in their neighbors’ yards, or any other thing they want to do. They are the chosen of God and the rest of us are just standing in their way.

Now, if I trespassed in someone’s yard for ANY REASON they would consider it their right and God-given duty to shoot me. I do not have a gun or any plans to get one. But (see the previous blog entry) it appears that there are two groups of people: the people with guns who believe they have a right to do whatever they want, and those without guns who must just accept whatever the others do. Happy July 6, and God bless America.

Here is the letter I will be leaving for them, to give them a chance to set the record straight in the event that the garbage came from somewhere else:

“Derek and Whitney—In my trash I found a large trash bag full of disposable dishware and used newborn diapers. Would those happen to be yours? Or did you happen to see anyone enter my back yard through the fence and leave a bag of garbage there? They should know I am not the neighborhood dump. If you need extra space for trash please in God’s name ask first. You have my number. Dr. Stan Rice. P.S. If you see anyone doing this, please let them know it is a bad example for Christians. –S.R.”

If anything should change the accuracy of the above information, I will update this essay or simply delete it.