Bill Bryson: Give litter the boot

Best-selling author Bill Bryson loves Britain’s countryside but loathes the litter, and urges walkers to help tackle the problem…

I can never decide which is the more remarkable fact: that you still have so much lovely countryside in this country of yours or that hardly anyone seems to find that surprising. I come from an American state, Iowa, that has never been anything but a large unit of agricultural production. It’s spacious, fresh-aired and altogether pleasant – some of us think it has a kind of understated beauty – but no one has ever regarded it as a walkable amenity. If you announced that you intended to amble across Iowa cornfields for pleasure, people would think you were out of your mind. You wouldn’t be able to do it anyway because there are no footpaths or stiles to help you on your way, no maps of sufficient scale to guide you, no tradition of public access. You would spend most of your time gingerly freeing yourself from barbed wire and wondering how far it could possibly be to the next town. (Answer: very far.)

Now compare this to your own dear and busy land, where there is scarcely a millimetre of soil that hasn’t been used since time immemorial for farms, towns, factories, quarries, roads, railways and all the other things necessary to maintain a thriving civilization on a small and crowded island. Yet it is here that you find some of the loveliest land on earth. Within 10 miles of wherever you are sitting now there is almost certainly countryside to take your breath away – landscape of green and timeless beauty, strewn with pubs and farms and rolling hills, through which you can roam for the sheer pleasure of it. If that is not a miracle, I really don’t know what is. And, of course, the Ramblers should be hugely proud of its role in opening up these magnificent landscapes so that we all have the right to roam through them.

Walking through this landscape still gives me as much pleasure as it did when I first came here. What has become painful is the increasing amounts of pizza boxes, drinks containers, carrier bags and other forms of fluttery detritus that despoil it. At the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), we think it’s time we all did something about it. Not long ago I was out for a walk on the Ridgeway near the famous White Horse at Uffington. It’s a popular route and this was a particularly busy Sunday. Along one stretch I encountered perhaps 70 people going in the other direction. When they had all passed I noticed that lying in the middle of the path was an empty crisp packet. I have no idea which, if any, of those people dropped it. But I do know this: not one of them picked it up. That’s a shame because if we all retrieved the odd crisp packet or cigarette box, there would be a lot fewer of them about. This is particularly vital in remote locations, where no council employee will ever venture. If we all made a collective vow to pick up, say, three items on every walk, it would really make a difference.

Of course, if you were feeling especially heroic, you could organise a litter pick along a favourite footpath or beauty spot. LitterAction (www.litteraction.org.uk), a website CPRE runs as part of its Stop the Drop campaign, gives practical advice on how to achieve this, and will help you find people in your area who might wish to join you. So far, LitterAction’s collective efforts have gathered up over 32,000 bags of rubbish – stuff that would still be lying around blighting the countryside if unsung souls hadn’t made the effort to clean them up. It’s hard to think of anything you can do for the countryside that makes a quicker difference or feels more gratifying when it’s done. There is one other simple thing you can do: complain. Every square inch of open space is someone’s responsibility and providing a litter-free environment is actually a legal obligation. Anyone who allows litter to accumulate in a public place – whether it is Network Rail, the Highways Agency or a local authority – is breaking the law. Insist that they do better. The more of us who make it clear to people in authority that litter is something we are not happy about, the more likely it is they will take action. Of course, solving the problem in the long term means a plan of action that involves a lot of education. But, in the meantime, we could all pick up a little and demand of those in authority that they pick up a good deal more. After all, no one wants to live in a country that’s only lovely from the ankles up.

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• This entry was posted on: Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
• Filed under: Blogs, Walk Winter 2009
• Tags: Bill Bryson, opinion, rural environment
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