My aboriginal Tennessee brothers and sisters may not like hearing what I've got to say here, but I've never been one for candycoating crap - you folks have, in many places, a really filthy dirty state.
I can't believe how little so many residents care about the natural environment of this unbelievably beautiful state. I live out near Donelson a stone's throw from Percy Priest Lake and even here, in a place that you would think folks would be extra careful about littering, the area is often overwhelmed with people's waste. Trash is damned near everywhere you look; drivers toss out their fast food garbage and flick their cigarette and cigar butts out of windows without a second thought. On Bell rd, on the east side of the dam, there is some moron who, about every three or four days, intentionally tosses out a hefty bag of household garbage directly onto the roadway. It's been going on since I moved here and it's hard to believe that it still continues unabated.
People use the quiet and very beautiful side road that cuts behind a large apartment complex and comes out next to the White Castle as their furniture dump - everything from couches to washers and dryers to television sets have been unceremoniously chucked out on the side of the road along there.
The recent
cleanup of Percy Priest is indicative to me of the lack of concern so many folks seem to have here, even of their most "treasured" scenic areas; you ought to see the areas where folks don't give two shits about the environment. The pic on the right there is of a field just off Trinity Lane by Gallatin Pike and I shudder to think of what downtown Nashville would look like without the fulltime fleet of "clean and safe" ambassadors that patrol the district with brooms and scoopers, picking up after some of the laziest, trash-tossin sunsabitches I've ever seen.
Call me spoiled for wanting some natural beauty without the festoons of humanity mucking it up, call me a granola-eating treehugger, call me what you will but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is that folks would shit in the same spots they must walk and live in every day.
To be sure, Tennessee isn't any dirtier than many places I've been and I mean no disrespect to the thousands of great people here who take responsibility for their waste, or those who walk the roadways with their litter sticks, picking up after the sweathogs who seem to believe the world is their personal trashcan, but dammit, it just appears those great folks are outnumbered 10 to 1 here by those who don't care at all what they do to our world and who comes along after them and has to wallow in their filth. I'm sorry for complaining but I know there are many who are in agreement with me and it just pisses me off that so many people have such little respect for their natural environment.
Doesn't seem to be much a priority for law enforcement, either, by the way, especially when it comes to the rivers.... Poor Jacque Cousteau - he must be spinnin like a lathe in his grave....
Stop using Tennessee rivers as trash cans, says Jean-Michel Cousteau
Even landlocked states can pollute the oceans
By ANNE PAINE • Staff Writer • May 27, 2008
Ocean explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau arrived in Tennessee with a message: Keep rivers clean to protect the planet's oceans.
"Stop throwing things away — the monkey reflex," he said in a phone interview.
"A cigarette lighter thrown on the ground will end up in the Gulf of Mexico, and it will kill a bird."
Cousteau, who spoke Thursday at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, said that just because the state is landlocked doesn't mean residents don't affect the oceans.
The state's rivers carry fertilizers, pesticides, car oils and trash to the world's oceans, he said.
"The rivers go in the ocean so they are the roots of the ocean," he said. "We're all connected to the ocean. We need to stop using it as a garbage can."
A banana peel that a monkey throws on the ground will help a tree to grow, he said. But hunks of plastic, a mascara wand, fishing line and other debris that washes downstream can end up entangling or being eaten by birds and aquatic creatures.
"There is runoff of heavy metals and chemicals, and we're overfishing the ocean," he said.
A U.S. Geological Survey report recently linked Tennessee and eight other states to a "dead zone" — up to a 7,000-square-mile area in the northern Gulf of Mexico around the U.S., where most marine life can't live. The problem is the result of algae growth caused by fertilizers, sewage and animal wastes that get into streams feeding the Mississippi River.
"We're destroying the coastal habitats," said Cousteau, the eldest son of the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.
The recent cleanup of Percy Priest is indicative to me of the lack of concern so many folks seem to have here, even of their most "treasured" scenic areas; you ought to see the areas where folks don't give two shits about the environment. The pic on the right there is of a field just off Trinity Lane by Gallatin Pike and I shudder to think of what downtown Nashville would look like without the fulltime fleet of "clean and safe" ambassadors that patrol the district with brooms and scoopers, picking up after some of the laziest, trash-tossin sunsabitches I've ever seen.
