I can vouch for the value of this approach. My apartment complex has an informal back path (paved by generations of feet) that people use to get to the nearby university. It also gets some occasional use from the local unhoused population. Over time, lots of litter had built up in a certain patch (you could hardly see the ground).
I noticed that I felt a sense of annoyance every time I walked through the tiny valley of trash (not annoyance at humans, but at the interruption in what was otherwise a nice miniature nature walk). So one day I bought some surgical gloves and trash bags, put on a podcast, and cleaned the path. It took less than two hours to remove 98% of the litter (the rest being things like bottle caps that would have been laborious to track down and collect).
The result: I got a clean path, a few hundred other people got a clean path, and I got to think of myself as โthe kind of person who cleans up the commons,โ which was more personally satisfying than any donation I made that year (because I am irrational).
I can vouch for the value of this approach. My apartment complex has an informal back path (paved by generations of feet) that people use to get to the nearby university. It also gets some occasional use from the local unhoused population. Over time, lots of litter had built up in a certain patch (you could hardly see the ground).
I noticed that I felt a sense of annoyance every time I walked through the tiny valley of trash (not annoyance at humans, but at the interruption in what was otherwise a nice miniature nature walk). So one day I bought some surgical gloves and trash bags, put on a podcast, and cleaned the path. It took less than two hours to remove 98% of the litter (the rest being things like bottle caps that would have been laborious to track down and collect).
The result: I got a clean path, a few hundred other people got a clean path, and I got to think of myself as โthe kind of person who cleans up the commons,โ which was more personally satisfying than any donation I made that year (because I am irrational).