The Lake News, Lake Cowichan, B.C., Wednesday, April 18, 1990
We're the top slobs
by Ted Burns
Lake Cowichan has one of the easiest waste disposal setups I've experienced. You put your garbage out
once a week and its whisked away never to be seen again. If you have too much junk for curb side pick
up, the incinerator is just a short hop away and it’s free.
Many would argue that it’s too easy and that there should be a recycling program. Indeed.
So why is there so much garbage in the bush?
Almost every old grade has mounds of household and yard junk scattered here and there. Old stoves
and refrigerators, sofas and chairs, roofing materials, lumber and plywood, cans and bottles, magazines
and newspapers, you name it. Then there are the highway ditches which collect litter at a depressing rate.
I know of several area youths who have collected enough cans in a year to purchase expensive mountain
bikes. There are many dollars worth of beer and pop cans in relatively small areas. Who among us is so
rich that they can afford to toss money away?
I was raised in the Kootenays, the West Kootenay. Dumping garbage in the bush is unheard of there.
It just doesn't happen. Nor do people toss litter from their vehicles. I walked a mile of road
shoulder near Kootenay Lake last summer and found one small plastic bag with a McDonald's cup inside
it. There are no Golden Arches around Kootenay Lake, so it must have come from a tourist of which
there are many.
A mile walk along Cowichan Valley highways would reveal a sickening amount -of litter. Witness the
mountains of garbage collected by high school students in this area last fall, a bulging bag every few
hundred meters. I've seen worse damping and littering, but only in Third World countries and backward
regions of some U.S. states, never in B.C. or Canada. Some nearby portions of Vancouver Island,
Nanaimo, Ladysmith and Chemainus, are almost as bad and parts of the Fraser Valley are right up there,
but we take the crown as Canada's top slob region.
Why? What can be done to curb bush dumping?
It is against the law to dump garbage randomly, but dumpers are almost never caught. The Litter Act is
not a high priority with enforcement agencies, and people who dump garbage seldom leave anything with
their name on it like cancelled cheques, mail or magazine subscription labels.
Bush dumping will eventually cease as community attitudes toward the environment improve. For some
reason, this area has been slow to adopt a green philosophy and a casual environmental attitude still
prevails.
It shouldn't last much longer. Help dispel it by encouraging your friends and neighbors to reduce, reuse
and recycle. And if you know someone who dumps garbage in the woods, let them know that this foul
deed is no longer acceptable. Inform them that the generation of swine is fast drawing to a close.