Day 15: At last – I’ve influenced others!

The last few days I’ve been thinking about how I could encourage others to engage with me during my litter picking challenge around my neighbourhood. On Wednesday evening, I went out to pick litter in the neighbourhood and made a strategic decision to visit a nearby park where I knew there might be more passers-by. Within a few minutes, my first interaction with a passer-by happened and they thanked me for cleaning up the area. I walked a little further and met three teenagers sitting on park bench. There was litter all over the place so I asked if they wouldn’t mind if I picked it up. As I was chatting to them, they made a very interesting observation that there were no bins around for them to dispose of rubbish. They stated that in a nearby more affluent area there were bins everywhere to encourage people to dispose of rubbish. I immediately was drawn to this point and we engaged in a brief discussion about the relative resources available to dispose of waste in affluent versus poorer areas. The most pleasing aspect of the interaction was that one of the teenagers starting helping me with the rubbish collection without any request from me. I continued on cleaning up the park and met another passer-by who again thanked me for what I was doing. The engagement and interaction of people with the experiment was something I had been seeking from the beginning and as I continued collecting rubbish I felt a genuine sense of pride that perhaps I had changed peoples perceptions of their environment, if even only for the brief time I interacted with those individuals. It also sparked something else in me. The idea of systems thinking immediately came into my head. Are some systems designed to support certain aspects and individuals in society and not others? e.g. the availability of bins in areas depending on affluence. Would such rubbish be tolerated in more affluent neighbourhoods in the first instance? Does citizen engagement in environmental issues differ depending on socio-economic profile? Is it easier to support pro-environmental behaviour when there is more greenspace available? Should individuals, communities, businesses assume a greater responsibility for litter and waste management than they currently do, or should this be left primarily to local municipal authorities? If so, how could systems be re-designed to support this? 

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions yet, but it least I’ve engaged people in change for the first time since I began the challenge. This comes with a sense of relief and optimism of what I might learn over the remaining two weeks of the experiment.