Community Stewardship : This Home is Our Home
At some point during the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, there were articles and features all over the place about the ways in which the earth was benefiting from our sudden lack of activity. The canals and lagoon of Venice were suddenly full of dolphins instead of oil slicks and cruise ships. There were “heat maps” showing diminished smog over America and Europe. It was a hopeful sign amid a strange and scary time.
But if you were looking for normalcy in the spring and summer of 2020, you had to look no further than my front yard on North Greenwood Street. Beer cans and fast food bags still collected along the low curb. The only real improvement was that now there were fewer cars to worry about as I stepped near the road to grab the trash!
There is a danger that the preacher never steps out of the pulpit, that everything he or she says can wind up sounding like a sermon. Instead of trying to fight that tendency today, I’m just going to give in! Litter is a ubiquitous problem. From North Greenwood Street to Country Club Road; from Hamilton Road to West Point Lake - our trash makes it everywhere. And this is where the sermon comes in: it is OUR trash. Litter is an issue of stewardship, and one part of stewardship is to understand that all problems are collective problems. When Cain asked the Lord, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, it was clear that the Lord’s answer was, “Yes.”
If there is anything that the pandemic has taught us, surely it is to learn how inextricably linked we all are. Unless I am careful, the virus that I have can easily become the virus that you have! And so it goes with litter: unless you are careful, the trash that you have can easily become the trash that is now mine, in my front yard!
No matter how far upstream we try to position ourselves, we all live downstream from each other!
So maybe I decided to write about litter as I was picking up a hamburger wrapper in my front yard, thinking of it at that moment as my own particular problem! But I was pleased to interview a few folks who have recognized that litter is a community-wide problem and can only be eliminated by changing the culture in our community. LaGrange City Manager Meg Kelsey, City Councilman Nathan Gaskin, and City Communications Director Katie Van Schoor joined me in a conversation on the topic.
Ms. Kelsey was clear that the idea started with the City Council and Mayor Jim Thornton. They all asked themselves how to improve the situation - is it education, or communication, or even enforcement? Enforcement is tricky, because every time someone litters, it’s a fairly small act. But those small acts add up until we see ditches full of trash or until we see something strange floating in the lake on a beautiful summer day.
It was clear that enforcement - fining perpetrators and writing tickets - just wouldn’t do the job. Councilman Nathan Gaskin told a story about the high-rise housing project in New York where he grew up. “It was 16 floors. We lived on the 15th. Step off the elevator on any floor, and you might see piles of trash, graffiti, or just about anything else. But get to my floor, the 15th floor, and you saw clean hallways and a peaceful environment. My mom and dad were the reason why! My dad tipped the superintendent, who would paint over graffiti as soon as we reported it. My mom would cook for him, and he’d come clean up the trash somebody left outside their door. Once they spent their resources making that floor more of a home, everyone who lived there started acting that way too.”
Mr. Gaskin didn’t use this word, but what he’s talking about is culture. Sure, a culture of keeping things clean and a culture of acting when you see a problem. But more than that, it was a culture of shared responsibility. It took time, it wasn’t easy, and it cost people something - but it made a difference.
Mr. Gaskin told another story about working for Delta. From the C-Suites, to the janitors, to the food service operators, everyone would get out on the runways once a year to pick up debris. This wasn’t about community service. This was about the survival of the company. If a foreign object flies into an aircraft engine, crashes can happen, or at the very least, a 20 million dollar engine can fail. Sure, there were people whose job it was to pick up the debris, but asking everyone to get out there meant that the care of the company was in the hands of the entire company. If you’ve ever flown on a Delta flight, that means that your safety was in the hands of not just the technicians and pilots, but the janitors and the accountants too.
That culture of shared responsibility is what Meg and Nathan are after in LaGrange. Over the past four years, they’ve started a program called “Leave LaGrange Better Than You Found It.” The first litter pick-up involved every city employee who wasn’t doing a vital task like water treatment or policing. With the approval of the City Council, every city employee spent a half-day picking up litter. Sure, there are sanitation workers in our city, and we are all grateful for them! But this half-day event was a way to show that every city employee is responsible for the beauty of our town, not only because they live here, but also because they are responsible for how appealing the town is to potential residents or businesses. Just like your clergy person can’t invite every newcomer to church, neither can the mayor or city manager (or even the entire sanitation department) be responsible for how attractive our city is to potential newcomers!
You likely know the story from there. That first event was a success and has continued from there, with new partners invited in. Every single month there is a litter clean-up event somewhere in Troup County. The City of LaGrange, represented by Mr. Gaskin and Ms. Kelsey, has partnered with Hogansville, West Point, and the county government. My own church, St. Mark’s, partners to clean up Granger Park, North Greenwood Street, and the Thread every December after the Christmas Parade. Factories, businesses, and civic organizations partner too. Any problem in our community is a problem for the community as a whole, and being good stewards means that we all pitch in.
Perhaps it sounds like a small thing, gathering 20 or 100 people to pick up trash. Certainly, when I see more trash in the Granger parking lot the week after our pick-up, it can be defeating. But this is the long, slow work of changing a culture. When I asked Meg and Nathan how they measure success, they both talked about involvement. We want to see less litter, but a meaningful change in the amount of litter will only happen when enough people take responsibility for the trash they see and the trash they might throw out.
When enough people take responsibility for a thing like litter, we also take responsibility for other things about our community. Something seemingly small, but obvious like litter, could lead to changes that are bigger but harder to see. Councilman Gaskin and City Manager Kelsey both talked about the different perspectives that litter clean-up has brought them. When you walk through ditches on side streets, in parts of town that you normally just drive through, you tend to get noticed by the area’s residents. And when those residents think you are serving a community service sentence, they might be more likely to talk to you than if they knew you were a councilperson!
Try to see our community in a new way, with an eye toward stewardship. You will see new problems you never saw before, places that need your action! You’ll also see new wonders, places that are inviting you to give thanks! God has given this whole earth to us as a gift. LaGrange and Troup County, too; your street and mine. I have to wonder if God is simply asking us to leave the whole thing better than we found it!