By BILL CHAISSON
I’m waiting for the science fiction film that begins on Earth Day. The opening scene would be in the middle of a bustling day of clean-up in some typical hinterland downtown. Teenagers are hauling around bags of debris. Groups of grown men are working as a team to haul shopping carts out of culverts. Some off-duty policemen are painting a little old lady’s house.
The camera finds an ordinary looking person slumped on a park bench distractedly scrolling through his phone and eating fast food out of a bag. He appears to reach the end of his attention span and pockets his phone, gets up and walks away, leaving the detris of his lunch on the bench. One of the teenager, outraged, confronts him, saying, “Hey, this is Earth Day, you know. You could at least throw out your trash.”
The stranger furrows his brow and says abstractedly, “What do I care? I’m not from this planet” and moves on. Shift to the face of a puzzled teenager, cue opening theme and start the opening credits.
Earth Day is Monday, April 22 and a lot of towns and the city of Claremont observe it by holding various types of clean-up before and after the date. Part of this is, of course, the traditional “spring cleaning” impetus that very much predates the inception of Earth Day in 1970. Today (Saturday) in Claremont you will be able to get rid of old tires free of charge. Between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. anyone with a sticker can take their tires to the transfer station at 875 Washington Street. From Monday, April 29 through Friday, May 3, the City of Claremont will be making its way through neighborhoods picking up bags of leaves. They must be in 30-gallon, paper, biodegradable bags and they may not include garbage, brush, or household items. The city council passed an ordinance on May 12, 2004 that mandated the paper bags.
Springfield, Vermont has what is called “Green Up” on Saturday, May 4. It is organized by the regional chamber of commerce. Whereas Claremont is focused on people cleaning up their own yards, Springfield puts aside a morning to invite the community to clean up common space downtown. It should be noted that the Greater Claremont Chamber of Commerce has nothing analogous planned.
This is my first spring in Claremont, so I don’t know how this works. Springfield is a small town with a comparably small department of public works. In contrast, Claremont is a city with a bigger staff in public works; is all the spring clean up of public space left to them? If so, they have a lot of cleaning up to do.
For one thing, what is it with people and littering around here? When I was little kid in the 1960s pretty much the whole country was covered with litter. In an episode of “Mad Men” the family has a picnic and just walks away from all the paper plates, soda cans, and other debris, which is supposed to stun the modern viewer. But here in 2019 the road sides and vacant lots of Sullivan County are treated like dumps. It’s like time travel, but not in a good way.
I try to take my dog for a walk in this town and I spend three-quarters of the time dragging her off people’s discarded fast food wrappings and containers, and there are some places I can’t take her because there is too much broken glass. The sad thing is, I’m not talking about some marginal neighborhood in town, I am talking about the heart of the city.
Some of this is not actually the City of Claremont’s responsibility per se. The debris is collecting in and underneath landscape plantings next to buildings, along fence lines (which are also overgrown with weeds and tree saplings), or in alleys between buildings. I have heard that there are a lot of absentee landlords in this city; this is one of the consequences.
In the 1980s the “broken window” method of policing became popular. The theory behind it was that you should be pre-emptive about dealing with crime. This is when “stop and frisk” came in. Stop the escalation before the positive feedback loop begins. Although the policing approach was arguably an infringement on civil rights, it generally worked. That is because there is truth to that method of addressing the actual circumstances on which the law enforcement metaphor was based. If you fix broken windows and it doesn’t look like the neighborhood is in decline, then it won’t decline.
The spring clean up season is an opportunity to reverse the slide toward shabbiness that is prevalent in several local municipalities (even tidy Windsor is on record as struggling with “blight”). We can sit around and argue whether or not “if you build it they will come.” But it seems quite likely that if you clean it up, everyone will feel a lot better about where they live. Because none of us are actual from outer space; we’re all from Earth. And Earth Day isn’t just about taking care of the whole planet. It is actually about taking care of where you live on Earth.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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