John: A terrifying thought – litterbugs inherit the world

Feb 18 2010 By John Avison

The man told me he and a group of friends came down into the woods every six weeks or so and collected a few bags of rubbish each.

He said the best way to get the broken glass out of the leaf-mould was with a dust pan and brush.

"I saw one of them trying to heat a can of beans by dropping it in a fire," he said. "Piercing the tin first might have been a mark of a crude semblance of intelligence, but this moron had not even considered it.

"When I spoke to him about it, he said ‘Oh, yeah’ and reached into the fire for the tin with his bare hands."

If the can had gone off in his face and killed him, this would have been the Darwinian principle at work – survival of the fit, destruction of the twit.

It goes without saying the numpty had not brought a plate or eating implements.

The little idiots arrive with their cans of lager and bottles of vodka. When they go, they crush their cans, break their bottles against a tree or stone and let their fires burn out unattended. In woodland. Baden-Powell must be turning in his grave.

They set fires under trees. For fun, they bring a knife and cut a strip of bark right round the bole of mature beeches. Perhaps they weren’t at school when the biology teacher explained that this usually kills a tree.

They were certainly nowhere near an educational establishment when the news was given out that the plastic loops used to hold six-packs together kill inquisitive animals.

Why should they care anyway? Their lives, unlike those of hedgehogs and foxes and perhaps the odd domestic cat, are much more valuable, much better protected by law.

We do often describe these juvenile idiots as behaving like animals.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Animals respect their environment, are careful with their waste and rarely if ever destroy things for the fun of it.

I was delighted that youngsters were having fun sledging when the recent snow came, but I look at the sledging field now and I see a Dunkirk of broken plastic sledges, the trees draped drearily with ripped plastic bags, even discarded socks and anoraks.

It’s a terrifying thought that these are the kinds of people to whom we must hand over the stewardship of the world.