Keep America Beautiful

Keep america beautiful!

Keep America Beautiful

Last week a press release came in about the Keep America Beautiful conference. It was being held this week in Orlando. Holy cow, I could go see what this is about! I conscripted long-time friend Rodney Smith to help in the endeavor.

Tuesday morning found us at Lake Buena Vista at the conference. I was hoping for lots of high fashion models in keeping with the Keep America Beautiful theme, but that’s not what they meant and everyone was pretty normal looking.

The first session we went to was about calculating the cost of blight. There’s not much blight in Chuluota but in spite of that it was a great presentation. If you live in a place where there is blight (not hard to find) and you are a conscientious citizen, these folks have developed an easy-to-use on-line tool that you can use to come up with a dollars-and-cents cost of that blight. Then you can use those numbers to convince public officials to attack the problem.

In session. There were concerned people from all over the country.

As it turns out, attacking the problem is far less expensive than ignoring it, both economically and socially. Ignoring blight lowers property values (decreasing tax revenues) and invites crime (raising the costs of providing police and fire services, among others), and has other negative social and economic impacts.
What is blight, you ask? As I understood it from the presentation, blight was anything that lessens the aesthetics of an area- abandoned buildings/vehicles, litter hot spots, graffiti.

Obviously this is a real problem in a lot of places. Keep America Beautiful, far from wringing their hands and whining, is finding practical solutions.

The second presentation I attended was about the state of recycling programs in the US. Recyclers are having tough times right now. Commodity prices are down and making a profit from the recycle stream is difficult for a number of reasons. That glass, paper, metal, and plastic isn’t trash to “dispose of” though- those are valuable resources. All of us need to start thinking of them that way.

The last presentation we went to was on why people litter, why they don’t, and how we can get people to change their disposal behaviors for the better. The presenter has a Ph.D. in psychology and has co-authored a book called Litterology (review to come- so far it’s great).

Did you know there’s a littering continuum? At one end are people who never litter and even pick up other people’s trash. At the other end are people who always litter, like it’s a God-given right. Most of us are in the middle someplace.

Our disposal behavior depends on a wide range of cues, received from other people and also from the environment we find ourselves in. To grossly generalize, most folks tend not to trash clean places but readily trash areas that are already littered, or blighted if you will. I’ll delve into this more in the book review.

Mike Rosen, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Communications for Keep America Beautiful, said to me, “Keep America Beautiful is not in the cleanup business. We’re in the behavior modification business. We try to get people to stop littering, to recycle, to be better citizens.”

So Rodney and I were out of our comfort zones because no one was talking about fishing. They were talking about real problems we all face and how to solve them, an exceedingly worthwhile endeavor. What a great group of outstanding individuals! Mr. Smith and I were both very impressed and glad we went, wishing we could have attended the entire event.

Keep America Beautiful (https://www.kab.org) has local affiliates in Florida. Keep Brevard Beautiful http://keepbrevardbeautiful.org and Keep Indian River Beautiful http://www.kirb.org are two found locally. They are always looking for volunteers for their mission- “to empower individuals to take greater responsibility for community environments by involving volunteers in litter prevention, beautification, recycling, and conservation education.”

Since they work for the common good, they deserve your unwavering support. Please consider joining them. The property values you raise may be your own!

John Kumiski
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