STILL the year of luigi

a professional trainer i love and respect once talked about how when he was new to training he thought he had successfully trained his dogs to sit and down with only a verbal cue, no physical prompt (this is notoriously difficult for a lot of dogs because dogs respond better to hand signals and gestures than verbal commands). on a whim, he filmed himself and realized that his dogs were actually responding to his head movements. without realizing it, he would raise his head slightly when he said "sit" and lower it slightly when he said "down". when he made an effort to keep his head still while giving the verbal cue, his dogs didn't know what he was asking for.

individual environmentalism gets a lot of flak in the face of corporate pollution but picking up litter makes a significant, noticeable impact. I spend about an hour a week picking up litter from around my dorm complex and I'm literally outpacing my community's litter production. Just an hour a week from one person is enough to offset nearly 200 people's worth of littering.

it would take less than 100 man-hours of labor per week to keep my whole college campus entirely litter-free. If you got two classrooms' worth of people to spend two hours per week each picking up litter, the whole campus would end up spotless and they'd straight up fucking run out of things to pick up.

I've been litter picking in the background of my walks and I've removed several bags of trash from the area. The other day, children were playing in the creek that I litter pick at a lot. They were jumping into the water and swimming, right in the spot where I pulled torn up cans out of the riverbed and where I removed nearly-buried fishing wire that still had hooks on the ends. Just one person with a sharps container made it safer for those kids to go out and have fun.

That was the most direct cause and effect thing I've had with litter picking after just a little while of doing it, but even aside from that it's just. Good to do. It makes your area cleaner and safer and removes plastic from the environment. Plus, people are less likely to litter in clean areas, and litter can not be subconsciously normalized in people's minds in a litter-free area.

But what this post doesn't even mention is the community aspect. Which is possibly my favorite part.

Every single time I go to pick up garbage without fail I have at least one positive interaction with a stranger in my neighborhood. Sometimes small like someone walking past and saying thank you for doing it. But also people sometimes offering to help or even offering a bottle of water. And since I've started doing it I've seen more people in my neighborhood going out with gloves and a bag on a warm evening after school or work. In which case when I see them on my walks I become the kind stranger they meet that day.