Like ‘littering in your back garden’

On a mild June evening, Terry, a couple of well-dressed visitors from the local Green Party branch and I spend a few hours wandering around the meadow. It is a tour of sorts, so Terry is in tour guide mode, explaining the history of the site and what the North Kelvin Meadow campaign stands for and how it is shared and managed. One story that he tells, pointing to the space around us, is of an absence – a notable lack of rubbish. Terry says, people do not tend to litter much and people often pick up anything they see on the ground. He goes on to say that the mindset of kids on the site is interesting: they pick up on “the community aspect” of it, and instead of dropping things, they hang on to them. Terry then points out that there is this sense that if they littered here they would be pissing off their parents. For them, Terry argues, it just would not make sense to litter here. One of the visitors nods along and makes the comparison to “littering in your back garden”.

Terry agrees, and claims that at the nearby Glasgow Botanical Gardens they have eight or nine people employed to keep the space pristine and litter-free. Because of a shared relationship to the land and to the people who use it (implicitly absent in his account at the Botanical Gardens), Terry thus weaves a story about how people are inhibited from littering.

A sense of ownership is undoubtedly important in this specific iteration of community, but this also highlights the way community as a frame gets used to explain things at the meadow, in this case, a dearth of littering: the resonance of the idea of community, of being part of a collective, is argued to work against practices of misuse, like littering and arson. What is elided in Terry's account into a simply community ethic is that litter-picking is a common enough activity, especially before toddler groups. Someone usually checks the area for left-behind bottles, cigarette butts or other miscellaneous rubbish before toddlers use it. This is an important grounding to this otherwise glorious vision of communality: it might well inhibit littering, but it also involves an active practice of litter removing.