Coyote Blog

I am more than willing to believe that too many people treat the oceans as a big trash can.  In particular, I have written before about how Southern Californians in general seem to love to leave their trash lying about.  However, I am going to call bullshit on this article:

In reality, the rogue bag
would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then
make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics
and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few
people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and
Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita
Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been
monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years.

"With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going
circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping," Eriksen said.
"There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris
worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry,
public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission
in San Francisco.

Uh, right.  Funny that it does not seem to show up in satellite photos.  Again, I am not minimizing the fact that a lot of jerks litter and the trash ends up in the ocean, but the floating island of trash twice as big as Texas and growing by 10x every decade?   I'll file that right next to the story of the grandmother who tried to dry her cat in the microwave.

As many of my readers know, we run over 200 recreation facilities across the country, from Washington to Florida.  This experience of serving nearly a million customers a year has yielded some odd insights.  One of the ones I published before is that the far-and-away worst litterers in the country are Southern Californians and LA residents in particular, California-eco-speak notwithstanding. 

Another observation we have made is that many times our most difficult customers turn out to be law enforcement officers.  I'm not talking about all of them - the vast majority of law enforcement officers are friendly, peaceful campers.  But when we have an incident of a customer refusing to follow the rules and wanting privileges no one else gets, like-as-not the customer is a law enforcement officer of some sort.  For example, we have had an off duty law-enforcement officer pay for one campsite, and then spread his stuff out over three, and refuse to limit himself to one site or pay for the other two he was using.   We have had off-duty law enforcement officers who had their car towed because it was parked for four hours in a tow-away zone, and then had their on-duty friends show up (well out of their jurisdiction) and interrogate our managers and otherwise harass them in retribution.  Heck, we have biker gangs come through that are more respectful of authority than certain off-duty law enforcement officers.

This irritating little site (HT: Hit and Run) possibly explains some things for me.  The site is apparently run by cops and is aimed at criticizing cops who do not extend other officers "professional courtesy"  which apparently is a euphemism for "allow them to break the rules with impunity."  Police officers who actually have the temerity to enforce the rules on other police officers are singled out as "dicks."  Maybe I understand why some of our police officer customers are not accustomed to having to follow the same rules as everyone else.