Have you ever been “called by nature” when you are away from home. You find the “Public Temple” for the job, but are horrified to discover that the normal toilet you expect has been turned into a filthy unmaintained cloze. Rather like a zoo for viruses and bacteria. Stink, dirt, stench… A place where everyone says to themselves, “I won’t come a second time”, only to “answer the call” for a while, the others will clean up. I believe that this picture is imprinted in the mind of everyone caught in it, like a roller coaster of horrors.
On November 1, the Day of the Awakeners, a handful of enthusiasts and I embarked on a cleanup along the shores of the Kazashko protected area near Varna. The idea was to get young people involved in protecting the planet. I walk along the shore, put waste after waste into the bag and hop the picture with the dirty clozeet emerges in my mind. I stood up and spontaneously said to the young man next to me, “Sorry that our generation is leaving you this planet – John. I said ours because the first plastic oil bottles appeared when I was in my teens. I remember it like I do today because I had read somewhere that the new plastic bottles could withstand an impact even though they were very fragile. That information helped me earn 10 bucks a bass. The sum included the money for the oil I bought and demonstratively dropped from a height of 1.5 meters to prove my point in the bass. Back then it was the beginning of disposable packaging in Bulgaria.
Around the same time they started selling fresh milk in plastic bags, and later the yogurt jars were taken out of use, and so on until today.
Thirty-eight years later there are all sorts of bottles and plastic packaging scattered all around me, and the indelible memory of the public cloze. Clearly, we did what we could. As the saying goes, ‘we have given our all’, but you, the young, have yet to live on this planet. And as with the public cloze, you have the option of continuing to dirty it, clean it up, or build a new one in the hope that you will not abandon it and will maintain it. The problem with building a new one is finding a new planet. And since a tray isn’t on the horizon, you’ll have to clean it up and put rules in place for use and maintenance. Sort of like an entrance fee. The longer we wait, the more we’ll have to clean.
