Yes, it is totally crazy that people will do that. It is even worse when there is no garbage cans, because that won't stop people...they just give the garbage a toss and expect someone else to pick it up. One Forest Service worker told me of one guy who'd just tossed a sack of garbage all over the place, and he told the guy that he needed to pack the stuff out that he brought in...the guy got belligerent and told the FS worker that HE payed taxes, so HE was the FS worker's boss and that he would NOT pick it up. As if the forest service has nothing better to do than pick up after people!

I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen similar behavior. I think that the forest service made a mistake when they removed all garbage facilities from the parks. The garbage isn't gone from the parks, instead of being in a can, it's all over. Very unattractive.

Our state parks removed all the garbage cans from the picnic areas and such. Carry in/carry out, is the theory, but most people just leave the trash all over. It looks worse than if the garbage cans were still there and full.

They still have cans in all recognized parks and campground in the National Forests here in Oregon. However, there are quite a number of picnic sites, campgrounds, and so forth that are not official, and they usually don't put garbage cans at those. They DO put crews into those areas periodically to clean up the garbage, and in some cases, they will used a retired person and pay him to go around to places like that an do minor garbage pickup.

WI must be cheap. They just leave the trash and mother nature to take care of it. They depend upon the good nature of others to clean up after the litter bugs. It really drives me nuts. More so the litter bugs than the parks dept. Sorry, I could go on forever on this topic, it really drives me nuts.

Are we talking about national forest service, or state forestry? The national forest service has a mandate that they must keep forest service lands clean, safe, and usable for the public. Leaving trash on the ground is extremely unhealthy, pollutes the water table, and violates that mandate. If it is the federal forest service that is doing this in your state, all of the supervisors could find themselves looking for new jobs.

I've seen it happen on both, the state and fed. levels. Our local parks dept. does an awesome job of keeping the parks perfect. I can not praise them enough. It may be that they live in the community too, and use the same places for their recreation.

When I first moved to Juneau, Alaska, there was no McDonald's there. I know, but try to imagine it anyway. After several years, someone opened a McDonald's at one of the busiest entrances to the freeway (yes, there freeways in Alaska).

In less than 2 months, people were complaining about all of the litter along the highway--most of it McDonald's wrappers. Several people blamed the problem on McDonald's, while other's defended them, saying "You can't blame McDonald's--they didn't put the litter the."

But as a friend of mine pointed out, there was no problem until McDonald's opened.

I think it's similar in the parks and forests. You can't blame management for people littering, but at the same time, you can't entirely blame the park visitors if management takes away the garbage cans and leaves no place to put the litter.

If you're a pressure-vessel engineer and you watch someone stoking a boiler until the pressure inside is beyond its design limits, and you haven't said anything to anyone about it, then you must share some of the blame for the resulting explosion.

__________________
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

I can see your point, but at the same time, I DO blame the public. I have a plastic bag (and usually extras) in my car for garbage. I don't find it any more inconvenient to throw a plastic bottle, empty pop can, piece of paper, or what have you, into the sack than it is to throw it out the window. It also costs me no more in actual expense to throw it away with the rest of my household trash when I get home, as it does to expect someone else to do it for me. In fact, it costs less. People have no idea how much money it costs to clean that stuff up.

Just one example is a place we like to camp. It is not a designated campsite, so there are no trashcans. People will go out and picnic, leaving behind all of the wrappers, cans, bottles, or whatever. They will camp there and leave their garbage behind (sometimes even in plastic bags...which animals promptly tear open). They will go there and have their skinny dipping and drinking parties, leaving trash behind. From June through August, the Forest Service must pay one man about $900 a month to clean. Another man who works for the FS does nothing but pick up and haul trash from that and 3 other sites...that is another $1400 a month. And still, at least twice a year, they have to go through there with a full crew, to pick up garbage. That is 8 men, working an 8 hour shift, twice or more a year. That doesn't even cover disposal costs. I figure that this is a minimum of another $640, twice a year, if we even figure that every man is only making $10 an hour. Not only is it the taxpayer who is paying for all of this, but while these people are all doing this cleanup, they are taken away from important tasks. All because people want to be irresponsible and lazy.

Incidentally, one year they actually put garbage cans and portable outhouses in at the place. It made no difference what so ever...there was as much garbage strewn about as without the garbage cans. The only difference, those portapotties ended up getting cans, bottles, and plastic flushed into the holding tanks. I wonder if ANY of those people would like the job of cleaning that garbage out of the sewage, by hand? Someone had to do exactly that.

First of all, eeewwww! Most of the places we go, we go to frequently, and are very public areas. I remember when trash cans used to be there, and the trash problem wasn't as bad as it is without the trash cans. Emptying a few trash cans costs less than all that clean up. I used to work for a local park dept. and it was 20 min to empty cans and pick up a few loose piece of trash. With trash everywhere, it has to take hours to clean up.