W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

I was recently asked by reporter Hilda Muños of the Los Angeles Times, "Why do people litter?" She didn't ask it, but there was a second question implied: "Don't people know any better?"

The answers to both questions are often counterintuitive and something that most Americans today, especially those who belong to Keep America Beautiful (and I totally believe in KAB's goals) don't want to hear. But here I go anyway. After all, it's about garbage, and whenever you deal with garbage, the truth will eventually come out, and the overall message reinforces the validity of the KAB approach!

As an archaeologist - someone who digs up the remains of long-past days, mainly refuse - I have learned that when it comes to something that is not wanted, a human being's first inclination is - and has been for more than 2 million years - to dump it where and when it becomes useless. From prehistory through the present, dumping there and then has been the means of disposal favored everywhere, including within most cities worldwide until at least the 1700s.

The first response of hunter-gatherers - our most ancient ancestors who moved every few days or weeks to hunt and gather fresh food resources - was to drop or throw whatever they didn't want wherever they were at the time and to simply move away from their campsites when the garbage around it got too deep and/or too smelly.

That seems reasonable to me if you have to move soon anyway and if you have no regularly scheduled garbage pickup. That means that dropping garbage wherever you happened to be was totally acceptable behavior.

I am not suggesting that hunter-gatherers were being environmentally irresponsible; they had no garbage containers to put their garbage in. Consider that KAB defines "litter" as "garbage out of place. In our society, that means garbage that is not in a garbage container or a recycling center, a landfill, or an incinerator. But how can garbage be out of place if there is no generally accepted place to put it in?

In fact, while it is easy to believe that our earliest preliterate ancestors divided items in their minds between "useful to me" and "not useful to me," anthropologists don't know whether they even had a concept of "clean" versus "dirty." In this light, the concept of "natural landscape" versus "littered landscape" seems unlikely to have occurred to most of our prehistoric relatives. Such concepts would mean little to people who moved frequently over vast expanses of territory.

The Australian government learned this lesson the hard way in the 1970s when it began an effort to settle Aborigines in permanent residences and discourage them from following their traditional lifestyle of yearlong cyclical treks around their humongous hunting-gathering territories. The bureaucrats built the Aborigines permanent settlements that would, to the bureaucrats' way of thinking, keep the Abs in one place where they could be looked after. Shortly after the first settlements opened, however, government officials were shocked to find that the Aborigines had trashed their brand-new 20^th-century tract homes by throwing garbage inside, outside, and every which way.

What was wrong with these people? What was wrong was that the Australian government officials didn't understand how garbage is related intimately to virtually every aspect of life: to death within a family, to conflicting obligations to family and friends, to domestic quarrels, and to the build-up of refuse and more. So to change hunter-gatherer garbage patterns, you have to change the whole hunter-gatherer lifestyle and not just give them permanent housing that they don't understand.

Just one of the things that the bureaucrats didn't understand was that hunter-gatherers traditionally solved social problems, just like garbage problems, by walking away from them. If you are having difficulties in your relationship with your wife or your parents or your in-laws, when you run into another hunter-gatherer band - which happened fairly frequently during the yearly "round" - you just hook up with the other band for a few months. When you run into your relatives a few weeks or months later, things would have cooled down and you could rejoin them on good terms.

That strategy doesn't work as smoothly in a settled village. Archaeologist Jim O'Connell lived in a permanent Australian government Aborigine community and determined that over an 11-month period, the 19 core households relocated into 85 new locations. Under Australian rules that required that you stay in one place, such moves usually involved building impromptu housing out of sheet metal and car body parts near your original house.

The trashing-houses problem was not a garbage dilemma; it involved all of the mindsets as well as the social and other behaviors associated with a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

As Gordon Willey, my major archaeology professor, once said to me, "Complex societies - 'civilization' - began when people settled down and the garbage got so deep that they had to figure out a way to clean it up." As noted above, the answer to the refuse problem in a permanent settlement was simple: Instead of the people moving away from the garbage, discarders have to reorganize and rethink a way to move the garbage away from themselves. That is being done with a little time and patience in Australia.

Our challenge today is equally obvious. Money has to be spent on litter prevention education, not only on cleaning up litter. We cannot depend on some inborn natural bent toward cleanliness. Like Rousseau's "Natural Man," it doesn't exist.

The key thing about humans is not our innate beliefs. Instead it is that we can learn appropriate time- and place-specific behaviors and beliefs. Consider one example:

The German magazine der Speigel sent one of its staff members to Australia to photograph "Natural Man" in his natural habitat. The photographer flew to Sydney and then to Alice Springs in the middle of the Great Western Desert of Australia. He then drove into the heart of the wilderness, where he began searching for his elusive prey.

A key part of his preparations included carefully adjusting his camera so that the lens (under sophisticated camouflage) actually took a picture out of the side of the camera instead of out of what looked like the end of the lens. The photographer did this because he thought that the Aborigines would probably be afraid that their spirits would be captured in the "picture box."

Eventually, as he sat on the bank of a gully, he spotted a small band of nearly naked Aborigines loping along the opposite bank. He was ecstatic and clicked away with glee until he heard the clearly identifiable clicks of the cocking of a .45 automatic and felt a warm muzzle pressed into his left ear. A calm voice asked him in Australian-accented English what he was doing. He responded that he was taking pictures of the tree in front of him. "Then why," said the voice in English, "is your lens pointed toward the people over there?"

The German photographer had run into a group of so-called "weekend Abs." On weekdays, the Ab with the .45 worked at a US satellite tracking station in the Great Western Desert.

It is the Law of Evolutionary Potential. We have to depend on education and peer pressure to prevent litter. And I am very supportive of the US Park Service giving out litterbags to people in the parks. Cut litter cleanups now if there is no alternative, but don't stop education campaigns, especially for kids. I believe what KAB believes; following its philosophy of preventive education will diminish litter. There is no other way to fight 2 million years of tradition.

Archeologist and Contributing Editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - November/December 2003