“There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.” – Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA.

I live just a few miles from the shores of Lake Erie in a quiet Cleveland suburb on a street lined with 100-year-old houses—a city deservedly designated a “Tree City USA” by the Arbor Day Foundation. Look at a satellite image of the city and surrounding suburbs and you easily see the dense canopy before it gives way to the inevitable urban deforestation of Cleveland-proper. You could be forgiven here for forgetting you belong to a metropolis that rose up out of the rock and soil to become in its heyday one of the most important, affluent, and populous industrial cities in the world—feeding the blue-black coal of the Appalachian Mountains into the massive maws of its industrial furnaces with their insatiable 3,000 °F hunger; refining and blasting for over a century the oil and steel that would build skyscraper skylines, battleships in wartime, and automobiles to stream across the hazy American landscape.

Like a great deal of what America consumes, Cleveland—and the empty hulking wrecks of the steel mills and warehouses that fed the voracious American appetite of the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—has been tossed aside and forgotten by the very country that grew powerful on the backs of its coke-shoveling, iron-pouring workers. Not far from what was once called Millionaires’ Row, empty brick buildings and mills stand as reminders of what made those millionaires wealthy. A bit farther away the former estate of John D. Rockefeller is nearly lost to time, save for Forest Hill—the 235-acre park deeded to East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights by his son in 1936, long after the original home had been destroyed by fire.

And so Cleveland unfolds, past the commercial lots that replaced the row of mansions, across both banks of the Cuyahoga River, beyond the villages and long-forgotten ethnic enclaves, into suburbs and exurbs, bounded only by Lake Erie on the north—a sprawling landscape, at times both bleak and beautiful, its people aware always of the past and often uncertain of the future.

Cleveland’s industrial past has a storied and fiery history that helped prompt the formation of the EPA in 1970, perhaps told nowhere more ironically than in Randy Newman’s ode to the burning Cuyahoga:

Cleveland, city of light, city of magic
Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
‘Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin’ through my dreams

Just west of where the Cuyahoga flows through what is known as The Flats—an industrial area now reinvented as a site for restaurants, bars, music venues, apartments, and an aquarium—the city has preserved a stretch of the Lake Erie waterfront for recreation. Edgewater Beach, as well as the surrounding park and marina, is a popular destination on the city’s near-west side and a welcome break from the football stadium and airport that otherwise consume a massive portion of Cleveland’s lakefront property. Its 9000-feet shoreline features both a swimming and a dog beach (which my collie, Oliver, loves despite his persistent hesitation to enter the water), both with an incredible view of the Cleveland skyline.

In winter, snow and ice from the lake creep up the beach in enormous white layers; in summer, the beach is filled with people swimming, sun-bathing, playing volleyball, doing yoga, biking, and playing with dogs. Edgewater is one of several spectacular Cleveland Metroparks that my family spends as much time in as possible. One recent morning in these waning but still-stifling days of a Cleveland summer my son asked me if we could go to Edgewater Beach and pick up garbage. A born naturalist, my son harbors an unusual degree of environmental concern for a twelve-year-old. He understands that environmental destruction is an imminent threat to the birds, bees, mushrooms, flowers, fish, and trees that he has loved and studied since his toddler days. And, too, he understands that the destruction of those means the inevitable extinction of humans themselves. But then again, maybe he isn’t that unusual—he belongs to a generation of kids who are far more environmentally-minded than even the most environmentally-minded members of previous generations. Much to the anger of those whose rapacious greed would have us milk every last drop of oil from the earth, environment and human existence be damned, a significant amount of his science education has focused a great deal on human-caused environmental destruction and climate change.

If you grew up in the America of the 1970s after the formation of the EPA, you likely spent a fair amount of time in front of a television. It’s safe to assume you are well-acquainted with Woodsy Owl’s admonition to “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute,” as well as the series of Keep America Beautiful commercials starring actor Iron Eyes Cody. Certainly the pathos of these commercials prompted a whole generation to consider the role pollution played in their lives, but they certainly didn’t constitute a scientific education on the matter. Regulations and laws would follow from the creation of the EPA, including steep fines for littering. Nonetheless, throughout the 70s and 80s I still regularly witnessed trash being tossed mindlessly out of car windows and garbage dumped into ravines and creek beds around the Southeastern Ohio hills of my childhood, where you were as likely to see an old refrigerator tossed down a roadside embankment as you were a happy meal bag blowing across a fast food parking lot. It took decades for littering to become stigmatized enough that beer cans flying out of the driver-side window of an old Olds Cutlass became a rare sight. An Italian actor in fringed leather, tear rolling down one cheek, may have made America feel momentarily sad, but it didn’t cause us to embrace an immediate change to our destructive habits. I suspect, however, that those kids like myself who grew up during that era were awakened enough to become environmentally-minded educators, politicians, and parents 20, 30, or 40 years later, hoping to influence a more mindful and encompassing environmentalism in those children and young adults to whom we are responsible.

So, maybe there has been a faint echo of Woodsy’s chirpy voice in my ear as I’ve guided my son these last twelve years. I know from his love of cheese that without a doubt Timer has influenced my parenting. It is no surprise, then, that he might want to do something to make his neighborhood, his city, his world a bit cleaner and a bit better. So I said yes to his request to pick up garbage at Edgewater, and we headed out one sweltering morning to Edgewater with bags and rubber gloves in hand, intending to clear the beach at least for the moment of all the plastic debris we had observed on so many other occasions. Unsurprisingly, even for 10 a.m., the beach was filled with bathing suit-cladded Clevelanders warming in the sun and frolicking at the water’s edge. We set off from the eastern end where folks sunbathe, hoping to make our way in tandem to the western end where dogs play happily in the water.

The thing about garbage, especially plastic garbage, is that once you’ve seen it—really seen it—you can’t unsee it. You quickly realize that it’s everywhere—bits and pieces, small and large, infiltrating every nook and cranny and waterway on the planet, the ghostly vestiges of our ceaseless consumption and carelessness. This must be how Capt. Charles J. Moore felt when, in 1997, he and his crew discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the remote North Pacific gyre—an area of trash believed to be twice the size of Texas. It seems Mr. McGuire’s assertion in the 1967 film, The Graduate, that, “there’s a great future is plastics,” too easily became our mantra.

At first we wove our way around the beachgoers, picking up multi-colored shards of unidentifiable plastic and the remains left behind by those who had retrieved their towels and moved on, leaving their detritus behind: lost sun glasses, Solo cups, hair barrettes, sand castle buckets, straws, candy packages, swimming goggles buried in the sand, soda cans (or, if you come from my hometown, pop cans), occasional illicit beer bottles, and half-used containers of sunscreen. Out past the swimming area where the dogs and the lake glass collectors congregate, the garbage includes what washes ashore from Canada just 54 miles away and from other states whose refuse refuses to be contained in dumps and garbage cans. Still, the plastic is everywhere, and there really is no hope of picking it all up. Here we found older and more weather-beaten cans and bottles, lost toys, lip balm tubes, an uncountable number of plastic tips from a famously-sweet cigarillo brand, and, inexplicably, dozens of dental flossers. Of course I applaud the fastidious dental hygiene evidenced by these discarded flossers, but I also have to wonder if these one-hit-wonders of interdental debris extraction aren’t also evidence of a society so committed to ease that the environmental effect is of little concern. Were rolls of floss really too heavy a burden to bear? Once your bag gets too full to continue, how do you maintain any sense of optimism for a clean and less toxic future?

We didn’t even reach the western end with our first pass before the bags had become too full to continue. Though I felt a rush of futility overtake me, my son remained heartened and proud of our work even as we passed more plastic on our trip back to where we had parked. He had done his best, after all, and he will do so again and again because, really, what else can one person do to reverse the inexorable commitment we humans seem to have to destroying ourselves? We drove home to our tree-lined street—over the Cuyahoga, past the towering cityscape, along the pot-holed streets of the Cleveland inner-city neighborhoods, past the parking lot where Slammin’ Sammy sells barbecue out of a pull-behind smoker, behind the ever-expanding Cleveland Clinic, up the hill and across Martin Luther King Blvd., alongside North Park’s towering 100-year-old Liberty Oaks, beside the drained and dried-up bed of Horseshoe Lake, past my favorite bakery, and onto our quiet street. I cannot say what my son was thinking, but I looked at our house and thought, I love this home, this town, this city and all that it took to build it, the lake at the northern end of my state and the mighty river at the southern end, the rolling hills and coal mines that my family has called home since my great- great-grandfather arrived here from England in 1869, the whole country beyond that, and the world itself. I just hope there are enough of us who give a hoot to build a future where we don’t have to worry if there will even be a future.