From spring until late fall, when winter weather drives me indoors to the treadmill, I spend 20 minutes each morning after my run around the Back Cove in Portland, Maine, walking the shoreline, picking up garbage. Every day is Groundhog Day — I gather plastic cups, syringes, food containers and cigarette butts the same as the morning before, and the same as the morning before that.I should almost certainly feel despair battling the daily fallout as late capitalism enters hospice care. But instead I get a base, primal satisfaction from actually just doing something, no matter how insignificant. We’ve forgotten, maybe, as the virtual world has slowly co-opted our lives, that we are meant by nature to move through and manipulate, to lift and carry and sort and transfer. Simple acts, I’ve found, have an outsized effect on the worrying over abstractions that otherwise takes up so much of my time. […]

The satisfaction I get from this habit is not uncomplicated. Sometimes I take paradoxical pleasure in getting dirty with other people’s trash, and other times the surprise dollop of last night’s honey mustard sauce on my shoe is enough to send me directly over the edge.

But the daily practice has taught me to be on guard against my own vanity — to notice and discard the smug feeling that sometimes arises when I see others enjoying the cove but doing nothing about how blighted it is. Instead I am confronted each day with my own fallibility, tininess and hypocrisy (as just one more trash ape among billions, I contribute to the problem simply by existing). And instead of puffing myself up, I check myself and reach for more garbage. […]

I go and gather garbage by myself most days. And occasionally something will occur that happily disproves my dim view of humanity. People will notice me, and wonder what I’m doing all sweaty and breathless down there among the marsh grass and the rocks. I present an intriguing enough figure for them to stop, in the midst of their preoccupations with the day, and take the time to discern what I’m up to. And when they figure out that I am, in fact, picking up garbage, sometimes — not often, but occasionally — they’ll come and join me. We’ll chat or, more likely, we won’t do much other than exchange hellos, or simply nod. Just a couple of strangers doing something small and futile together, for no other reason than that it’s right. The kind of modest, workaday miracle that feels like it could, with any luck, lead to something bigger.

It seems near all but certain that we are, as a species, too shortsighted and distractible, too enamored of dividend checks and retail therapy, to really turn this ship around. But, then, despair and idealism are two sides of the same cop-out, and I’ve indulged in both more than enough in my time. So I’ll keep splitting the difference, keep picking up trash — and keep hoping that simply setting an example can be meaningful.

— Ron Currie, Jr., excerpts from “This is What Keep My Eco-Anxiety in Check” (NY Times, October 23, 2023). Ron Currie Jr. is the author of the novel “The One-Eyed Man” and a writer for film and television, most recently for the series “Extrapolations.