I consider it one of my civic duties to collect the garbage weekly from the edge of the public road that runs along the front of our corporate property.  It is amazing to see what flies out involuntarily (my inner optimist) from cars and trucks as they pass by from day-to-day.     

Each week I collect roughly half of a kitchen-sized garbage bag of beer cans, fast food packaging, cigarette butts and soda cans.  Having done this for years now, I’ve often wondered why beer and liquor bottles are inevitably empty while soda bottles are typically discarded with at least three or four gulps left, with the cap on.   I’m still waiting for someone to start throwing money along the road, but that’s just a backup in the event that my lottery ticket isn’t a winner.     

At any rate, I was walking along the road, scanning the ground for goodies, my mind wandered to an episode of Boston Legal, a clever drama-comedy by David E. Kelley that tells the story of the professional and personal lives of a group of emotionally-challenged attorneys.  The particular episode, Finding Nimmo, Denny Crane (William Shatner) takes Alan Shore (James Spader) to British Columbia for a fishing trip to help Alan get over a break-up.    

Denny, who lacks a filter between his brain and mouth at times, was talking with Alan and the dialogue went as follows:    

Denny Crane: You one of these environmental lawyers?    

Peter Barrett: Is there something wrong with that?    

Denny Crane: They’re evildoers. Yesterday it’s a tree, today’s is a salmon, tomorrow it’s ‘Let’s not dig Alaska for oil cause it’s too pretty?” Let me tell you something. I came out here to enjoy nature. Don’t talk to me about the environment!    

Alan Shore: All reality. None of it scripted. [In a Shakespearean aside]    

Have you ever heard logic like that used to defend some point or another?  “I came out here to enjoy nature.  Don’t talk to me about the environment!”  Pretty funny.    

Careful not to disdain the generous donors who fund my garbage collection habit, I’ve often meditated on why someone would feel comfortable with discarding trash in a public place.  I’ve heard people say: “They wouldn’t do that at home, in their bedroom or garage!”  Well, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t.  If you’ve ever been to a developing nation, where the public services are less capable of dealing with this tendency or perhaps the citizens are less restrained in their littering, the results are hard to ignore.    

A thought that came to mind one morning after someone passed in their car and tossed a “Biggie” something-or-other out the window as I looked over my shoulder is that there is a shortage of pride and respect in our great nation.   To me the consideration about taking care of the environment seems less about deciding whether I am an environmentalist or not and more about the need for the restoration of a basic underlying pattern of pride and decency in our citizenry.    

If you care about something, you take care of it.  You go out of your way to see that it receives the necessary attention to not only survive, but prosper.  It doesn’t matter if it is a person, place or thing.  As human beings we have the highly developed (if we so choose) capability of acting as stewards of the worlds we center.    

My parents taught me a wonderful lesson about borrowing things that now seems to me to be an idea worth spreading.  If you borrow something, return it in better condition than you found it in.  Borrow a car, for example, and return it with more gas or take it through the car wash before bringing it back.  The principle is simple but its impact is profound.  Not only is the world around you enhanced by your loving care, the trust you build with others will increase exponentially.   

Some have said that we are borrowing the earth from future generations.  An interesting concept, isn’t it?  Nothing on this basis is excluded.  Your friendships, your possessions, the public spaces that you don’t own but that you enjoy and so on can and will all benefit from taking this basic approach in living.     

If you care about the future, please return everything in better condition than you found it.