As I drive and walk around Malibu, I wonder: Who is really making decisions? Daily, I notice totally absurd signs or see unbelievable things going on.
For example, at Bluffs Park there is a sign asking people not to feed the squirrels—they are wild and should stay wild. Fair enough, until you notice that it has been placed right next door to a city trash can without a lid on it! Seriously, if our park overseers knew anything about squirrels, they would know that they will happily pull trash out of the trash cans. To make it even worse, I checked the other trash cans and none of them are designed with lids. Everyone knows that parks should have trash cans with secure wildlife-safe closing lids on them, don’t they? Apparently not.
Then there is the Caltrans work crew, which is working its way along PCH, brush clearing the weeds. That’s fantastic, until you realize that they are bagging the green waste in bright orange plastic trash bags! So, instead of loading the brush into a truck and taking it as an inexpensive dump of “green waste” for mulch, they are bagging the green waste in plastic bags, so making it “trash” that is filling up the landfills and probably never degrading. To make matters worse, they are spending hours snipping the weeds into little pieces so that they fit in the plastic bags (not your best example of a time and motion study). To cap it all off, the very expensive but stylish orange plastic bags say “Don’t trash California.”
Kate Novotny