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| By Mark Cross |
I just finished driving along the Northern California coast—from
up above Bodega Bay (where Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed) to Carmel-By-The Sea (where Clint Eastwood of
RNC fame was mayor). I must say, those
Californians have their &^%$ together.
Or, more accurately, that they have it carefully collected, stored, and
out of sight.
I was amazed at how little litter there was to be found
along that stunning coastline. In Greece
(as well as many other Mediterranean destinations I find enchanting), garbage
literally decorates far too much of the landscape. Whether or not the situation in Greece rises
to the level of a national disgrace I am not qualified to say, but garbage is
certainly the hottest subject of citizen ire on Mykonos.
One story stands out in my mind. A couple years back, on a stunning, virtually
empty southern Mykonos beach directly across the sea from the neighboring
island of Naxos, a woman who’d been sunbathing nude walked to the edge of the
water carrying a plastic garbage bag.
She proceeded to empty the contents into the sea followed by dropping
the bag. An American couple nearby yelled,
“Hey, what are you doing?”
The woman screamed back, “Don’t you foreigners tell us how
to live on our island! The currents will
carry it all to Naxos.”
What can one do with some one like that? Okay, this is real life not a murder mystery,
so what else can one do with such a person?
To set the record straight, I know the woman and, though Greek, she is
not Mykonian and lives on the island only during tourist season. Nor is she is like most Greeks, who would not
bath nude or so brazenly pollute their waters.
But she does exemplify a ready willingness on the part of many to
litter.
Garbage collection and disposal on Mykonos is a mega-problem,
one of seeming concern to virtually every resident of the island except those government officials
charged with actually doing something about it.
Officials claim the problem stems from a five-fold and more increase in
population during tourist season, but California too has a massive tourist
population to contend with…and its crisis fiscal situation is often compared to
Greece’s.
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| Omiros Evangelinos |
Many say the root of Mykonos’ problem is public indifference
toward an “I can do as I wish” attitude that has left much of the wildest parts
of the island accessorized in wind-blown blue plastic shopping bags and cast
aside water bottles. But there are those
who speak out and others willing to do more than just speak. One is Omiros Evangelinos, co-owner of perhaps
the chicest and best-known nightspot on Mykonos, Astra.
Omiros organized a group to clean up one of the island’s
windiest beaches and filmed the process.
Then he submitted his work to an international film festival. Here’s a
link to the video, titled MYKONOS BLUES. It’s subtitled in English, except for a
forty-five second piece beginning at the 7:00 minute mark where some American
writer is interviewed and the subtitles are in Greek.
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| Mykonos Blues opening shot. |
The video was shot during the last campaign for mayor of
Mykonos and so appropriate concern for the environment was expressed by
electioneering government officials who showed up at the cleanup site for some
camera face time. A particularly
interesting example of the political byplay on Mykonos today is the four minute
or so give and take with the mayor (starting at the 8:00 minute mark).
To Omiros’ credit the filming did not stop at the cleanup site. He took his camera to find out what happened
to the garbage collected by the volunteers that was “picked up by the city” for
disposal. To me, this was the film’s
most poignant, tragic example of a local government mindset that haunts the
island as an insidious threat to paradise.
As Omiros points out (beginning at the 12:35 minute mark),
what was supposed to end up in Mykonos’ new sanitary landfill, never made it
there. Instead, the bags were dropped by
the side of the road at the old illegal burn site, left to break open and be re-distributed
across the island by the winds. Or
burned, and God knows what distributed then.Maybe the woman at the beach was not as out of line with local mores as she seemed? After all, there is the old adage, “A fish smells from his head.” Never more so than in the case of garbage.
Jeff—Saturday
