When I was in Mexico some years ago I wrote the essay reproduced below as a column for my local paper. It was, as you can see, a description of a problem that pervades the region. litter. Today I took a stroll across the fields to the supermarket. Usually I take the car but I only needed a couple of things and fancied a walk. When I last did this the fields were covered with snow and looked pristine and beautiful. Without the snow it's a different story. There is litter everywhere - empty crisp packets, crushed beer cans, plastic bags, chocolate bar wrappers, cigarette packets... even a shopping trolley. It's a depressing sight. I am constantly baffled as to why people seem to take so little care about the world that they live in.
Only this week, as I walked home from the station, I noticed a half eaten bag of chips (that's fries to the US readers) on the pavement and a half drunk can of extra strong lager in the grass next to it. It's all rather depressing really.
Mexico may have the problem, but we have it too. There is detritus everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, even in people's front gardens where drunkards on the way home have carelessly tossed it, unwilling to wait five minutes and stick it in their own bins.
By way of cross-threading, the next few days on my photoblog will take a break from documenting my travels and illustrate today's walk.
We entered Mexico at Nogales and immediately found ourselves trapped in the ten kilometre limbo between the United States and Mexico border posts. We sat for several hours on the flyblown litter strewn car park thinking up increasingly desperate ways to pass the time. Some tried reading. Others bet on which would be the next car alarm to go off. A few of us in a more competitive spirit vied to outdo each other in the number of beer cans we could crush with a single swipe of the foot.
Every passing vehicle slowed to allow its occupants to observe the antics of the loco gringos clinging to their diminishing patch of shade.
The problem was both simple and apparently insoluble and it came in two halves. Our half had begun when we sailed unchallenged past the US border post and drove to the Mexican one. There we had had our passports stamped and bought our tourist cards. To leave Mexico you have to go to a bank, pay a fee and get this card stamped. That was where the other half of the problem lay. Before the truck was allowed into Mexico we needed documentation that we didn't have. Charlie had gone on ahead to obtain it but had never returned. Without him we couldn't get in but unless we got in we couldn't get out. So we sat on a filthy car park that stank inexplicably of drains thinking up ways to divert ourselves.
The car park was our first exposure to one of the biggest problems that Mexico has :- rubbish. The whole country is rapidly being buried under a mountain of it. Eventually Charlie, who had been searching for us at the US border post, arrived and we crossed into Mexico but by then it was too late to hunt for a proper campsite so we pitched camp at the side of the road, watched over by the illuminated statue of a saint high on a nearby hill.
Next morning, seeing it for the first time in daylight we discovered a wilderness of broken bottles, empty cartons, rusty cans, cigarette packets, human and animal faeces and every other conceivable form of detritus. It wasn't a rubbish dump but it might as well have been. It would be facile to suggest that poverty is to blame for though it certainly plays a part it isn't really the cause. It's more that people don't seem to care. They have too many other priorities to worry about the rate at which the tidal wave of waste is destroying their ecology.
There is overpopulation - Mexico City alone has 22 million people - and over-industrialisation. There is the iniquity with which the indigenous Indian peoples are treated and the corresponding problems when they - in the form of the Zapatista movement - strike back. Mexico has too many other problems to get concerned about what is seen as 'litter'.
On the other hand the extent of the problem shouldn't be underestimated, a point made pointedly and poignantly two weeks later when we visited the Canon el Sumidero. This is tourist country, the kind of place where you show your best face to the world. Boatmen take visitors along the river and through the canyon. It is a spectacular and beautiful place with dramatic waterfalls plunging down from precipitous cliffs watched by the crocodiles as immobile as sand sculptures on the bank. At one point water cascades down for hundreds of feet over the trees washing the leaves and branches down as if the foliage were dark green blankets draped in layers across the hillside. The force of the water fills the air for dozens of yards with a fine cooling mist, like a gentle balm against your sun scorched skin. It is a gorgeous and magical sight.
Until you look down at the river.
It isn't the greasy unhealthy sheen that stops you dead, nor the sickly vivid green of the clogging algae. It is the sheer volume of the flotsam. there are plastic bottles and bags, pieces of broken furniture, rusty cans - all drifting slowly towards an ecological catastrophe. Where the eddies and currents wash it into the caves and crevices of the shoreline it is worse still. In places the water is scarcely visible at all such is the density of this grim tide.
For one night I thought we had avoided it. We made camp on one of the beaches somewhere on the gulf where there is a small turtle sanctuary. The water and the sand were clean. In the early evening we watched as a large bucketful of day old turtles were released at the water's edge to swim away into the ocean.
I wandered away up the slope of the beach to where the dunes were covered in grass, where they started to turn into swampland. There, just out of site from our encampment were more plastic bottles and more discarded food wrappers. Who I wondered could have come all the way out here to dump this stuff ?
I went to bed feeling depressed by the inevitability of it all.
The following morning there was a more optimistic coda as I watched a group of men clearing some of it away in black sacks. I only hope they weren't taking it to dump in the river.
Only this week, as I walked home from the station, I noticed a half eaten bag of chips (that's fries to the US readers) on the pavement and a half drunk can of extra strong lager in the grass next to it. It's all rather depressing really.
Mexico may have the problem, but we have it too. There is detritus everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, even in people's front gardens where drunkards on the way home have carelessly tossed it, unwilling to wait five minutes and stick it in their own bins.
By way of cross-threading, the next few days on my photoblog will take a break from documenting my travels and illustrate today's walk.
*
We entered Mexico at Nogales and immediately found ourselves trapped in the ten kilometre limbo between the United States and Mexico border posts. We sat for several hours on the flyblown litter strewn car park thinking up increasingly desperate ways to pass the time. Some tried reading. Others bet on which would be the next car alarm to go off. A few of us in a more competitive spirit vied to outdo each other in the number of beer cans we could crush with a single swipe of the foot.
Every passing vehicle slowed to allow its occupants to observe the antics of the loco gringos clinging to their diminishing patch of shade.
The problem was both simple and apparently insoluble and it came in two halves. Our half had begun when we sailed unchallenged past the US border post and drove to the Mexican one. There we had had our passports stamped and bought our tourist cards. To leave Mexico you have to go to a bank, pay a fee and get this card stamped. That was where the other half of the problem lay. Before the truck was allowed into Mexico we needed documentation that we didn't have. Charlie had gone on ahead to obtain it but had never returned. Without him we couldn't get in but unless we got in we couldn't get out. So we sat on a filthy car park that stank inexplicably of drains thinking up ways to divert ourselves.
The car park was our first exposure to one of the biggest problems that Mexico has :- rubbish. The whole country is rapidly being buried under a mountain of it. Eventually Charlie, who had been searching for us at the US border post, arrived and we crossed into Mexico but by then it was too late to hunt for a proper campsite so we pitched camp at the side of the road, watched over by the illuminated statue of a saint high on a nearby hill.
Next morning, seeing it for the first time in daylight we discovered a wilderness of broken bottles, empty cartons, rusty cans, cigarette packets, human and animal faeces and every other conceivable form of detritus. It wasn't a rubbish dump but it might as well have been. It would be facile to suggest that poverty is to blame for though it certainly plays a part it isn't really the cause. It's more that people don't seem to care. They have too many other priorities to worry about the rate at which the tidal wave of waste is destroying their ecology.
There is overpopulation - Mexico City alone has 22 million people - and over-industrialisation. There is the iniquity with which the indigenous Indian peoples are treated and the corresponding problems when they - in the form of the Zapatista movement - strike back. Mexico has too many other problems to get concerned about what is seen as 'litter'.
On the other hand the extent of the problem shouldn't be underestimated, a point made pointedly and poignantly two weeks later when we visited the Canon el Sumidero. This is tourist country, the kind of place where you show your best face to the world. Boatmen take visitors along the river and through the canyon. It is a spectacular and beautiful place with dramatic waterfalls plunging down from precipitous cliffs watched by the crocodiles as immobile as sand sculptures on the bank. At one point water cascades down for hundreds of feet over the trees washing the leaves and branches down as if the foliage were dark green blankets draped in layers across the hillside. The force of the water fills the air for dozens of yards with a fine cooling mist, like a gentle balm against your sun scorched skin. It is a gorgeous and magical sight.
Until you look down at the river.
It isn't the greasy unhealthy sheen that stops you dead, nor the sickly vivid green of the clogging algae. It is the sheer volume of the flotsam. there are plastic bottles and bags, pieces of broken furniture, rusty cans - all drifting slowly towards an ecological catastrophe. Where the eddies and currents wash it into the caves and crevices of the shoreline it is worse still. In places the water is scarcely visible at all such is the density of this grim tide.
For one night I thought we had avoided it. We made camp on one of the beaches somewhere on the gulf where there is a small turtle sanctuary. The water and the sand were clean. In the early evening we watched as a large bucketful of day old turtles were released at the water's edge to swim away into the ocean.
I wandered away up the slope of the beach to where the dunes were covered in grass, where they started to turn into swampland. There, just out of site from our encampment were more plastic bottles and more discarded food wrappers. Who I wondered could have come all the way out here to dump this stuff ?
I went to bed feeling depressed by the inevitability of it all.
The following morning there was a more optimistic coda as I watched a group of men clearing some of it away in black sacks. I only hope they weren't taking it to dump in the river.
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