Of vandals and volunteers

For those of us working at the campground, the day after a long weekend or holiday was always the worst. I would step out of a cramped 18-foot travel trailer, ride my bike to the public rest room, and brace myself for chaos. One morning I found the shower curtain in the women's rest room cut into ribbons, as if someone had gone after it with a straight razor. Who gets pleasure out of that kind of destruction?

Living and working in a state park campground for two summers during grad school brought me into contact with some wonderful people who loved the woods and the lake and the fishing and wanted to spend quiet time sleeping in a tent, cooking over a fire, and communing with nature, but then there were also the other people--the ones who burned everything that wasn't chained down, including the picnic tables; who drank too much and started fights, vandalized equipment, or left behind unspeakable messes. 

I have never understood these people, but in the years since we worked in the campground I have found evidence of them everywhere. They're the people who have been trashing national parks during the government shutdown, the ones who chopped down protected Joshua trees and left behind mounds of human waste (read it here). Meanwhile, other individuals and organizations are volunteering to keep some parks clean and accessible (click here), including concerned families, the Yosemite Climbing Association, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association, one of whose leaders told CNN,

Service to our nation and cleanliness are important parts of Islam....We could not sit idly by as our national parks collected trash. We will lead by example and dispose of this garbage appropriately and invite all Americans to join us in these parks and others across the nation.

Another article (here) describes how private companies are paying to keep bathrooms cleaned and roads groomed in Yellowstone National Park because their businesses depend upon winter tourists. It's possible to look at their actions cynically and say they're just looking after their bottom line, but they reveal an important difference in values between those who work to preserve the parks and those who trash them.

What benefits, after all, do national parks provide? For businesses operating snowmobile tours, the bottom line is financial profit, but what about for the rest of us? If we can perceive how the parks provide intangible benefits to ourselves and future visitors, we will take care of them; if, on the other hand, we see the parks as mere playgrounds where the rules get in the way of our immediate pleasures, then we do what we want without regard for the future. It's the tragedy of the commons all over again.

This concept seems obvious to me, but then again I still don't understand what kind of pleasure anyone gets out of shredding a shower curtain. The person who destroyed it probably extracted all the pleasure (s)he could get out of the campground and then left behind a path of destruction, convinced that cleaning it up was someone else's problem. How can we convince these people that public spaces are not everybody's problem but everybody's resource and responsibility? How can we get them to see beyond immediate pleasure and perceive the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that accrue to a nation that preserves its fragile treasures? 

It's a small thing, a shower curtain--or a water bottle tossed carelessly along the trail, or a mound of human waste left in the path, or a tree cut down to make way for a new road. But when all those small things add up to a big mess, I'm thankful for the people who volunteer to clean it up, one small thing at a time.   

At Savannah National Wildlife Refuse, one of my favorite places.