[pct-l] Hiker Trash (Literally)

[Eric Lee]

Shepherd wrote:
>
Perhaps there should be more emphasis on LNT at the Kick-Off next year.
>

I could be wrong, but I don't think the issue is a simple matter of
education.  Maybe I'm naively optimistic but I would hope that anyone old
enough to thru-hike is old enough to know, intellectually, that it's not a
good idea to leave trash all over the wilderness.  The problem is that they
don't *know*, the problem is that they don't *care*.

I suspect there's probably two categories of "don't care".  On one hand you
have people who just flat out don't care about their impact on others
because they're just jerks all the way around.  Sadly there's not a lot you
can do about those people other than ostracize them and hope they go away.

On the other hand you have people who aren't completely selfish but they've
kind been overwhelmed by the epic-ness of their journey and they start to
feel like it gives them special exemption from the rules.  Like as in, "I
have to eliminate every single ounce of extra weight from my pack in order
to make it to Canada, and this trash weighs two ounces, so of course I'm not
going to carry it with me.  I'll just drop it here and someone else who's
not on such an epic quest as mine will hopefully take care of it."  These
people look a lot like the first kind in behavior but they can often be
reached if you can break through their reality-distortion field and make
them understand that the world doesn't revolve around them just because
they're a thru-hiker.  This usually take more than a public service
announcement, though.  It takes direct peer pressure and people telling
them, "No, dude, that's not cool and it's not acceptable."

Eric