Every year for a few years now I've gone with a couple friends and my kids to some 300 acres and pick up trash. Yesterday was our day this year.
There are widely spaced ponderosas and lodgepole with sage, bitterbush, and low juniper. The land hasn't been disturbed much in the past hundred years.
A half mile west of the land is a small landfill and the area often sees very strong winds. The empty shopping bags at the landfill sometimes get lifted up into the air and they float on over onto the 300 acres. That's mostly what we pick up.
There are also always a few empty cardboard boxes from neighbors that are swept over from careless trash handling. We also sometimes find old bits of glass or other signs of trash from 50 or more years ago before the woman who now owns the land was there.
Those tiny barrel cactus were blooming. Green up had already come but the grass is fairly thin.
This year I took only my daughter, my boy was out camping with the boy scouts. My girl would spot a grocery bag caught in sage brush and shout, "trash ahoy!" as if it were a treasure. We filled five large plastic trash bags.
The trash would be hard to even notice if you were just looking at the view, I see it though. Without the trash everything looks cleaner to my eye. I don't know that ecologically it makes any difference if the trash sits on a sage and gets shredded or it sits in a landfill. There's a difference to me. Maybe if we live in a less trashy place we'll also try to not trash our air and water too.
I try to do more than stop getting plastic bags at the grocery store, more ecologically that is. We did drive to go get trash, and we do use large plastic bags to carry the smaller ones. But that land we clean up provides most of the meat for the three of us and our families, without corn or packaging or feedlots. We all participate in the management of the elk herd in Rocky Mountain Park, and by "we all" I'm including the woman who owns the land.
We all live fairly simple lives, not buying much, not many toys, not consumptive life styles, not much travel. The woman who owns the land too, who certainly has the where with all to do pretty much anything she'd like. Many things of value are no more expensive than the feel of the springtime sun and the breeze. Friendships, kids, trees, and rocky hillsides.
The complete files of Leopold's writing and notes is now available digitally. Just happened last week. I'm all excited. I asked my friends if they'd ever heard of Aldo Leopold. "You mean the scopes?" one suggested. (Leupold) makes very high quality glass and is spelled almost the same. Neither guy had ever heard of Aldo Leopold but one was interested in getting a link to the papers. Tons of great hunting stories from Aldo.
The north side of the hill was criss crossed with many social trails from elk. Lodgepole and doug fir. There are trails not ten feet apart paralleling each other. In the winter there are maybe hundreds of elk laying up under these trees chewing their cud. There was no fresh sign but close to the house we could smell them. They probably laid up there overnight.
Both my friends you would probably call strongly conservative but I doubt they follow politics closely at all. There's not much politics involved in picking up trash off the side of a hill.