For some reason I have garbage on the brain this week. And yes, I’m talking down in the gutter, dirty, nasty, filthy stinking garbage. The kind of garbage you hide from your parents; that you would be ashamed to show your neighbors. Trash so bad that it has to be taken out to some remote location in the scorching, barren desert and abandoned.
Welcome to the desert country of Pima County in Tucson, Arizona. Home to some of the worst and most blatant illegal dump crimes in the Nation. It is also home to one K.C. Custer — Environmental Investigator at large.
ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S BATTLE
Think of him like a trash Private Eye: an Eco-Sherlock Holmes. Armed with Surgical gloves, sanitary wipes, a GPS, a digital camera, a 4×4 pickup truck named Watson (okay, so I made that last part up)… K.C. Custer spends his days covering vast tracks of desert pursuing, rummaging through and ultimately uncovering the hidden secrets of abandoned refuse. It is a job he has been doing for the last 20 years. A job which he created and maintains out of his passion for justice and a trash free community.
Here’s how it works: Custer finds an illegal dump site (know as “wildcat dumps”) out in the desert. He searches through the trash by hand, looking for any clues: discarded documents with phone numbers, names written on the washtag of shirts, serial numbers on hardwire or discarded furniture. Then he uses his deductive skills and gathered information to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice. In this case, as an enforcer of state law, Custer hits illegal dumpers with heavy fines (up to $500 a day for every day the trash sits there)… as well as making them collect and dispose of their illegal trash properly.
Here’s the inspiring part — while Custer now makes a decent living as an Environmental Investigator, he started out as an ordinary eco-conscious citizen who refused to let the garbage piles grow. For years he protested so vocally about illegal dumping that the county finally passed an ordinance banning it. Then they hired him to enforce it. It is a job he designed, built from his passion and pursuit of environmental awareness and responsibility. In his opinion,a crime against nature is just as wrong as a crime against humanity. In fact, a crime against nature IS a crime against humanity
Which reminds of the comment Superforester Candance wrote in response to my last post on trash that was so diamond-sharp and brilliant, I have to share it here:
“The other day when picking up trash I was thinking about how gross it is. Trying to use the least amount of fingers for the job, holding it as far from my clean t-shirt as I could. And then I thought about how gross it is for the Earth. How does the soil feel about plastic? It can’t be broken down and created into new beautiful flowers or worm food. Yuk.”
So true. K.C. Custer is a one-man trash crusader. And we need more people like him who care this much about our environment; who will get their fingers and clothes dirty in the process of making our world a better, cleaner place. And guess what, “those people” are YOU! What’s to stop you from grabbing a cloth bags, throwing on some running shoes and collecting loose trash? Or starting your own Environmental Investigation Bureau? All it takes is a little awareness, an extra inch of effort and a whole lot of enthusiasm.
And as we here at Superforest already know, once you get momentum… positivity is the most sustainable energy there is.
–Aaron
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