Harris Beach State Recreation Area in Brookings had more than 1.7 million day-use visitors in 2023, making it the most visited state park for the year.
Courtesy of Oregon State Parks
University of Oregon and University of California, Davis students were blamed for leaving a large mess at Shasta Lake in California over Memorial Day weekend. In Oregon, the Fourth of July is a busy day for parks throughout the state and 2023 was a near-record breaking year for visits.
More guests, however, typically means more trash left behind, and workers spending hours of their day picking up after visitors.
John Mullen is a park manager for the Southern Willamette Management Unit for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Eric Crum is a North Coast District beach ranger for the agency. They join us with details of their experiences and what they hope to see in the future from park visitors.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with trash, lots of it, trash left on beaches and trails and lakes and rivers ‒ in some of Oregon’s most beautiful places. Places that literally belong to all of us. This is one of the big issues that the managers of state parks are dealing with these days. They’re being forced to clean up after more visitors who are leaving more stuff in their wake.
John Mullen is a park manager for the Southern Willamette Management Unit for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Eric Crum is the North Coast District Beach Ranger for the agency. We talked yesterday. I started by asking John if you could just give us a sense for the scale of the problem.
John Mullen: Litter happens, right? There’s careless litter that happens ‒ say, comes out the back of your truck or something like that ‒ which we’ve seen over the years. I’d say there has been an uptick recently where folks are actually walking away from an event they have at a picnic or something like that and they just walk away and they leave their trash there. I haven’t seen that as much in the past so that is getting more expansive. But the other issue is the price of dumps and the economic issues people are having and so sometimes some of our remote parts, they’ll actually back up and dump a truckload and that creates an economic hardship for because it takes rangers out of the field. But it’s also just as unsanitary and unsightly for the visitors.
Miller: Wow. And I hadn’t heard of that so much. That’s very different than just in a kind of not caring way leaving your trash behind in a kind of negligent way. Instead of paying to dispose of my trash, I’m going to go out to some place and dump it there on purpose. That’s really different.
Mullen: That’s a consistent problem with state parks, but also with much of your public lands ‒ Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, they’ve all had this issue for years ‒ but I would say there’s an uptick of recent with that sort of dumping it. Sometimes it’s garden material, but other times it’s just full-on trash.
Miller: Well, it sounds like you’re saying that we’re not just or necessarily talking about more trash because of an increase in visitation, something that we’ve talked about a fair amount on this show over the last, I don’t know, five years or so. But you’re at least as much talking about changes in behavior.
Mullen: So there has been an increase due to just the sheer numbers of people that are coming out and we expect that. But there’s a little difference if at least intuitively, I don’t have a hard data set, but anecdotally, I would say more people are walking away instead of taking their trash over to a trash can. There’s also a lot of the other visitors are impacted and you see, or at least I see and other rangers see, the reactions from then, often coming over to help rangers or myself whenever I’m out there to help us clean it up and then they’re disgruntled because it’s the people’s parks and so they’re out there going, jeez, I’m sorry, these people left the stuff. So we get help at the same time, but these are small … it only takes a few, right? And then that really disparages the grounds for the rest.
Miller: Eric Crum, what about on the North Coast? I’m curious if bigger events, say a wedding or some other big event that may have 100 people, does that mean more trash?
Crum: No, for the large events I can’t say it necessarily does. To have a large event on the beach in Oregon, you are required to have a special use permit from our department. And so, when there’s paperwork involved and we have contacts and you’re actually applying for a permit, that allows us to put some conditions on the permit and that kind of holds people a little more responsible. What we see more on the beaches ‒ when we have a sunny weekend on the coast, it’s 70 degrees and we have a huge influx of people ‒ and we just see a lot of typical beach trash left. People come in and sometimes they’ll have a picnic, maybe they’ll bundle it up, but oftentimes they’ll leave it on the beach. More commonly we see items in leftover fires where people are trying to burn cans and garbage and then just, you know, leaving it there on the beach for someone else to deal with. So I wouldn’t say it’s the larger events. It’s more of the kind of one-off typical user of the beach.
Miller: Is there one event or one day each year that reliably leads to the most trash on your beaches?
Crum: Yes, I could say it’s probably most likely the Fourth of July. So, not only do we have a huge influx of visitors to the beach for that holiday, it’s a time when lots of illegal fireworks are used on the beach. There’s just a huge influx of usage on that day. And the morning after Fourth of July and even going into July 6th and 7th, every single beach that I’m responsible for has an incredibly large amount of leftover, spent fireworks, bags of garbage, bags of picnic garbage. Just that event in particular is a pretty impactful event for the beach.
Miller: What does it take to clean up after that?
Crum: It takes ranger support. So myself as a beach ranger, I’m responsible for cleaning up beaches as part of my job. But when you have such a large influx like that on a certain day, I’m asking for and pulling other ranger support out from the parks that I work around like the Nehalem Bay, Oswald West and those rangers are now helping me out on the beach. So it’s a big staff burden.
And then for me in particular, when I have to be cleaning up debris for days on end, it’s really pulling me away from the typical duties that I would be doing as a beach ranger like our general beach patrols. I mean, we’re the eyes and ears out on the beach. So we’re often helping on fire patrols and doing fire educational outreach so that we don’t have fires in illegal places or too big. We’re out there doing contacts with visitors just over general visitor safety. We play a pretty important role in the marine mammal stranding network. Anytime we find live or dead protected marine species, we’re actually part of the reporting network that helps get that information to our partnering agency. So when that type of activity happens, it’s pulling away from those core duties, not only from the beach ranger, but also from rangers and the parks around us.
Miller: How much do you rely on volunteers or locals after a huge trash event? I mean, we heard from John that it seemed like, on a kind of ad hoc basis, there are disgruntled but well-meaning park visitors there who will help out even if they’re not happy about it. The sense I’ve gotten over the years is that for Oregon’s beaches, there’s maybe a more organized network of beach lovers who sort of take it upon themselves to do beach cleanups. Do you rely on them?
Crum: Absolutely. My area spans about 26 miles as the crow flies. And if we didn’t have those great local community relationships, I would not be able to do my job. They really serve as some of the on the ground, eyes and ears every day. Almost every morning, there are engaged community members picking up garbage on Cannon Beach, on Manzanita Beach, in Rockaway. I know some of them by name, they know me by name. We really couldn’t do it without them. They help us clean up a lot. They’ll have bags staged for me and I know where to get it. So they’re a huge help. The local communities play a very big role in it. And also, there’s groups like SOLVE that we work with in a more organized fashion to execute our larger cleanup events and sometimes in more isolated locations like out on the Nehalem Spit. So, SOLVE plays a big effort, but definitely the local communities are very active and engaged and play a big role in cleaning up.
Miller: John, you both have mentioned obvious kinds of trash like literal trash bags or smoldering fires or beer cans. What are some things that people might leave that they might not even consider are problems?
Mullen: Well, one of the things that happened, while the large events are under a special use permit and as Eric mentioned, those are relatively well performed because there is a paper trail and they’re under an obligation. But at the same time, they may not always read the fine print where such things as confetti, which is oftentimes small shiny objects ‒ rice, plastic or little paint covered paper ‒ is sometimes used in a celebration. And while they mean well, those are some of the hardest things to clean up because they’re very small. They also trick wildlife, especially birds or small mammals and fish, aquatic species, into thinking of their food because they will blow around in the wind. So they’ll move and they’re shiny, so animals will eat those and they can’t digest them or ingest them. So they actually get full of these foreign products and that leads to starvation of some of the wildlife. So, those are an issue, those smaller things. The other things, they’re big enough. But all the litter has an impact, as Eric mentioned, both on the capacity of the rangers and the park staff to clean up, but it also has a big impact on the wildlife and the environment surrounding them.
Miller: John, how are the waterways or the land that you manage ‒ and the wildlife in particular, in those places ‒ how are they affected by the trash you’re finding?
Mullen: Well, in a variety of ways. Plastics are getting a lot more in the news as, you know Dave, they break down into microplastics, so they get into the waterways. It can be a plastic bag or a wrapper or one of those plastic bottles and they begin to break down over time, especially when they’re exposed to water or sun by sitting out in the sun, they’ll break down. And then again, as mentioned, those are ingested by aquatic animals as well as terrestrial animals. Plastic bags are an issue. People don’t think about it, but wildlife will actually enter a bag because there might be crumbs in it. And I have found this because I have done a lot of work with birds in the past. And so they get trapped in there and die of getting trapped in the bags.
Miller: Do you ever get called in to help wildlife that are stuck and alive in trash?
Mullen: Periodically we get called and we typically call the wildlife rehabbers. But in my past, before I was a park manager, I did get called a lot. I was working in the Midwest at that time as the lead naturalist in an area and yes, I was the person to go out and find these animals. I have a variety of stories of trying to untangle various animals from issues they’ve gotten into with trash.
Miller: What’s one that stands out?
Mullen: Oh, there’s a couple. I was called when a great blue heron was down in a ditch next to a busy road and when I got there, its wing and leg had gotten connected by those plastic can holders that have holes in them for the cans. And so it was unable to fly and it was struggling on one side. It takes a trained person to actually work with something like a great blue her because they have a very long neck and of course they want to defend themselves. So they’ll shoot that neck out with their head with a beak and it can catch you in the face, in the eye. We wear gloves that come up to our elbows. So the bird was struggling. I was able to get a hold of it. I did have some assistance to help me, because if you can get them into a canvas bag or something, once they’re darkened up a bit, they’ll settle down and then you can work on them to untangle them. In that case, it was successful. I was able to get the wing and the leg undone and nothing was broken. I did a full examination of the bird and it was fine, and was able to let it go, and it took off.
There’s others that weren’t so lucky and I had to take them then from there into an animal rehab station. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as you will, because there’s so many that we don’t actually get called for.
Miller: Eric, how is coastal wildlife affected by the trash or the people who are leaving it?
Crum: Yeah, so I have, having spent so much time on the beach, I have witnessed dead wildlife, birds and marine mammals that have had plastic in and around them or entanglement. So that’s definitely something that is witnessed out there. It can particularly impact. Oregon is pretty special. We have a listed endangered species that actually uses our beaches for nesting and breeding habitat and that’s the Western Snowy Plover. There’s a designated management area for the Western Snowy Plover on the Nehalem Spit in our area and those birds need open, dry sand without debris or rubbish or garbage in it for their clear line of sight. So any items left behind in that area in particular can have a pretty dramatic impact on that species. And again, it’s a list of federally endangered species so that can be pretty significant.
Miller: Eric, on the most basic level here, what we’re talking about are the kinds of values that I’m desperately and not yet successfully trying to instill in my six-year-old, that we clean up after ourselves. How do you get someone who is 26 or 46 or 66 to learn the lesson that I would have hoped they would have gotten a long time ago?
Mullen: You know, I think it’s just important that people know that Oregon is very unique and that the beach is literally for everyone. Since the 1967 beach bill, the beach has been open to the public for its free and uninterrupted use. And so with that, we want to leave it as a place for everybody to enjoy because it is for everybody. I think just if people know when you come to the beach and you see this pristine area and you’re coming there and using it, the person that’s coming behind you or tomorrow wants to have that same experience. And we often say like, if you can bring it down to the beach, I’m hopeful that you can also bring it back up with you. And just the simple mantra we’ve heard before. It’s leave it better than you found it. I mentioned that the communities around here play a really important part in cleaning up after people, but if we left it better than you found it, then everybody will have that same enjoyable experience that you had when you showed up.
Miller: John, do you have any ideas for how to get more people to adopt the kind of stewardship model that Eric is talking about?
Mullen: Well, I think you, you’re on the right track, Dave as you know, instilling it at a young age to your six-year-old is so essential. The whole ethic of stewardship is what we’re all about at Oregon State Parks. And of course, we want to just spread the word that the ethics of stewardship of these are your parks. These are not the rangers’ parks, these are the community of Oregon. And so we’re all sharing a public space and it’s so special that we have these. And when people hear stories like you’re bringing on the radio, but also what we do is we get out and we like Eric and other rangers teaching people about the detrimental effects of the trash to the wildlife. People don’t like to hear about dead birds on the beach or tangled up. And many people here really have an emotional connection to these parks, and I think the more we can spread that word, the more we’ll continue to have these parks for the future and just be able to enjoy these wonderful places.
Miller: John and Eric, thanks very much.
Mullen: Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.
Crum: Thank you so much, Dave. Really appreciate it.
Miller: John Mullen is a park manager for the Southern Willamette Management Unit for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Eric Crum is the North Coast District Beach Ranger for the agency. We talked yesterday.
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