The mess left behind by revelers at the recent Pemberton Music Festival has sent online media comment pages into hyperdrive. It also serves as a cautionary tale for the organizers of the upcoming Squamish Valley Music Festival who are hiring extra clean-up crews to deal with the anticipated post-show debris.
A blogger on the CBC news website called the Pemberton celebration a “Litter-Fest” that “speaks volumes about the people who attended.”
After the party was over, a photo of the garbage strewn field was posted on Facebook. It shows a pasture overflowing with discarded plastic water bottles, abandoned tents, camping chairs, coolers, air mattresses, and a variety of other detritus. A sanitation worker responsible for the cleanup told a news reporter that it was “insane, absolutely insane.” She said bags were overflowing every night and it was “hard to keep on top of things.”
One commenter said British Columbians are not necessarily greener, “they are simply more hypocritical.” Another one added that this generation rants about the injustice of not being given great jobs, high wages, cheap housing and free higher education, but “they can’t even pick up after themselves.”
When a photo of the cleaned-up venue was eventually posted on Facebook, a festival goer advised readers: “Get over it. I paid money for a ticket. The cleanup is included in the cost of that ticket. Done. Hippies rule! Use your energy to scream at real issues.”
But a poster on the Squamish Chief’s Facebook page noted that this “is a reminder of what a throw-away society we are and why it’s OK to leave your garbage everywhere, because it’s someone else’s job to clean it up.”
And therein lies the rub. What this discussion points to is a pervasive attitude problem. It reaches well beyond a four-day annual bash in a field in Pemberton and should be attributed to a larger demographic than the collection of youthful festival goers in attendance.
Closer to home, the areas around Cat Lake and Anderson Beach, as well as many of our trails, retail parking lots and roadways, have become free-range garbage cans. The irony is that B.C. has historically been the epicentre of the green movement, a province where strident environmentalism is the Holy Grail.
B.C. is home to powerful eco-lobbies that continue to hold the forestry industry accountable for its tree harvesting practices, who put the kibosh on the expansion of oil pipelines, and who are in the process of holding the fledgling liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry’s feet to the fire.
We need to channel those long-established green ambitions into halting the rising tide of public refuse. Let’s start right here in town by making the Squamish Valley Music Festival ground zero for that anti-littering campaign.
