After the Durdle Door beach rescue of the merely badly informed young men who jumped vertically from a great height into shallow water there was a follow up story regarding the rubbish that had been left behind all over the beach and cliff tops.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:39 pmA friend who manages some nature reserves on the south coast described visitor behaviour last weekend as the worst he's ever seen in his career (which is >10 years).Fishnut wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:07 pmPeople have been flocking to the beach and even pooing in people's gardens due to a lack of open facilities and an inability to consider anyone but themselves.
Part of this I suppose is people being overexcited after being cooped up so long, but it's pretty disappointing.
And yesty when I got in from work I noticed this story regarding mountains of litter being left by visitors to various nature reserves: which may be connected to boaf's comment above.
And jut now this about the same behaviour in Yorkshire.
I'm sure it's not just me, when we were young, we were taught that leaving any litter any where was one of the worst possible things you could do. 'The bins were full' or 'There weren't any bins' just wasn't an excuse: you took it out with you, you took home with you and having since spent most of my life since out of doors it's not even 'habit' or 'second nature' you just don't do it; when you leave a place you check and make sure that there is nothing left behind.
And yet leaving litter behind seems to be on the increase - and blatantly too - not just packets papers and tins and bottles thrown behind a hedge, the rubbish is not even thrown and hidden.
Passing a... it's not a village green it's in a town, neither large nor small, and it's a piece of what was probably heath-land that is now kept mowed as a 'community open space' for community events - passing often, as I do, a few years ago, probably ten or more now, it was suddenly noticeable that there was an increase in littering: in the evenings you could tell it had been a nice day and that people had been sitting out and enjoying it because all across this wonderful green open space were piles of tins, bottles packets and carrier bags just left lying in the open. There are bins at this place, all around the outside, the people who leave the rubbish actually had to walk past a bin on their way home! And yet there is no way in the world that I could walk across open land leaving rubbish behind me knowing that people watching me knew that I had left it there.
But to see it on the scale shown in the news stories above is just incredible: something ingrained has been lost.