Tribune editorial staff

Imagine walking in a lush, wooded area, enjoying the sight and sound of a creek babbling at your side.

Then, imagine your disgust when all of a sudden you reach a point where the creek stops babbling due to a huge pile of garbage disrupting its flow. Unfortunately, this happens too often in Lawrence County.

In our Thursday edition, we reported on a huge pile of rubbish discarded in Little Ice Creek in Perry Township. This is one of several such instances that have been brought to our attention.

What, you may ask, would cause someone to do something like this? Apathy is the only logical answer we can imagine.

Our county commissioners are aware of the problem. While they can lend a sympathetic ear, this is really an issue government officials cannot fix with a set of regulations. Even if they were able to secure funding to clean out the creeks, chances are they would be polluted again eventually.

Stopping the problem is also difficult for the county sheriff's office. It would be difficult to find out who is responsible for littering the creeks without either catching the culprit red-handed or finding documentation with a name and address on it.

Keeping creeks clean is something

that we, as a community, must work on continuously. Public awareness about how important it is to protect the waterways and how little actions we take around our own land would go a long way in making this happen. Keeping the land around creeks free of debris would also help.

In a perfect world, those responsible for polluting the water would clean it up and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but in reality that will not likely happen.

We urge our elected officials and other government agencies to pursue all funding avenues to correct this problem now and call on all residents to band together to make sure the creeks stay clean. We suspect people will still pollute the waterways, which we find deplorable, but if we clean up the big mess now, the smaller ones can be taken care of much easier in the future.

Let's make a pact to protect water quality for our generation and those to come.