What is it with people and litter? What makes a person drop newspapers, food wrappers, beverage cans or plastic bags on the ground or throw them out of car windows as they drive along the street? What gives some people the idea, if indeed they are capable of forming ideas, that they can just discard their rubbish wherever they want to?

It’s bad enough seeing garbage blowing around the countryside and perhaps even worse in  towns and cities, where rubbish bins, placed on most street corners for that very purpose, are simply ignored – try working that one out. It’s bad enough too to see the mess that responsible, decent  people have to contend with but what is far worse, for me, is witnessing the effect on our planet and the other animals with whom we share it.

Two things prompted this blog.  Firstly, whilst sharing an ocean side picnic with my girlfriend on a lovely sunny day over the weekend, I heard a clattering sound and looked up to see a large lizard shaking a Fanta orange can around. At first I thought that he was having a bit of fun but then quickly realised that he’d got his head stuck and was trying to shake it free. He was suffocating. I tried to gently remove his head  but it wouldn’t budge and his efforts became more frantic.

I rushed back to my car to grab my diver’s knife to at least puncture the can and give him some air hoping that I wouldn’t be too late to save him. Fortunately, whilst I was gone he managed to extricate himself and survived. Not so the little lizard in another can dumped nearby. He had fallen or climbed into the can and had drowned in the remnants of somebody’s drink.

The second thing was watching two beautiful turtles swimming in the ocean yesterday, having read an earlier account of how they, like so many creatures in our oceans, suffer from our disgraceful habits. The story I read told of how a turtle had been washed up on a local beach, close to death and of how, when the local vet carried out an emergency operation, he found a plastic bag in the poor creature’s stomach. The story had a happy ending since this turtle survived, unlike the thousands of turtles, dolphins, small whales and other creatures who die agonising deaths each year as they mistake our discarded plastic bags for jelly fish and other food.

There are so many more examples of our selfish and wanton behaviour both on land and sea and it all makes sad reading. When are we going to learn how lucky we are to inhabit this truly beautiful and wonderful planet? A planet that we share with millions of other creatures, all with an equal right of occupancy. We are only here for a short period of time and surely it isn’t too much to ask that, in that time, we look after our world? Not just  for the sake of the oceans, rain forests, deserts and jungles and all the creatures that inhabit them but for the sake also of succeeding generations of our fellow man.