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- cross-posted to:
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Despite being asked to clean up after themselves, about 3,000 students celebrating Memorial Day weekend left piles of debris
College students celebrating Memorial Day weekend by California’s Shasta Lake left behind hoard of trash, according to US Forest Service officials.
Last weekend, approximately 3,000 students from the University of California, Davis and the University of Oregon partied at Shasta Lake, a 30,000-acre reservoir in the golden state, and left piles of debris cluttered around the lake.
According to forest service officials, despite being asked to clean up after themselves, the students left behind trash including cups, cans, plastic wrappers and pool floats.
Speaking to CBS, Shasta-Trinity National Forest recreation staff officer Deborah Carlisi said that staff members handed out trash bags to students for them to pack up their items.
“Some students used them, some students didn’t,” Carlisi said. A three-person cleanup crew ultimately spent six hours picking up the trash around the lake. Nevertheless, not all the trash was removed.
Merely asking a large group of people to clean up after themselves is incredibly naive. The Forest Service, which runs hundreds of parks across the country, really ought to know better.
Even if a large number of people go out of their way to be responsible, it only takes a minority of assholes to make a huge mess. Without any kind of enforcement or guaranteed accountability (or better yet, a reward system like minibyte described), people are going to act like they normally do - whether they’re college students or not.
College students are adults and should not require a fucking reward system to pick up their own trash.
Yeah, but like… have you met adults? They also don’t pick up their own trash.
No, they shouldn’t, but adults constantly have to be threatened or bribed in order to meet the bare minimum of responsible behavior. Just look around.
Yeah, lotta shopping carts outside of bays out there
Ok boomer
It wasn’t in this article, but another article on the incident mentioned that earlier in the year, there was a large group of students from Oregon State University who had a similar party weekend. The difference was that 40 of them stayed an extra day to clean up and haul out trash.
In that situation, it took just a small minority of people to clean up the entire mess of the large group. I have no idea if this is something that had been planned from the start but I can see how just a few principaled individuals deciding to clean up could inspire folks who maybe felt bad but didn’t want to make a fuss to stay and help out.
That’s awesome!