I consider myself to be the kind of person who can quite easily imagine myself in someone else’s place. I don’t know if I’m actually any better at it than the average person, but judging by the comment sections on social media and the conversations I’ve had with other people, I really struggle to get angry at strangers like many others do, even for things that anger is an appropriate reaction to.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t condemn their behavior, but that it doesn’t provoke a particularly negative emotional reaction from me. I observe the world from a distance, and when I see someone acting differently, I generally can come up with a charitable story about why they act that way. While it doesn’t usually justify the behavior, it at least helps me imagine why they’re like that and reminds me that if I were in their shoes, I’d likely do the same thing.
This applies to cheating, violence, racism… Name a bad behavior, and I can come up with a story about what a person might be telling themselves to justify it. However, littering is something I simply cannot comprehend. I cannot wrap my mind around what a person is thinking when they’re throwing trash on the ground for someone else to pick up. If it’s something “minor” like a cigarette butt, then okay, I can somewhat understand, but tossing your McDonald’s takeout bag onto the side of the road is completely psychopathic behavior to me. I don’t think even the worst people in the world think of themselves as “bad” because they rationalize their behavior somehow. But if you throw trash into nature, you must know you’re being a massive jerk.
Tl;dr: I want to hear the best justification for littering.
There’s no “justification.” It’s laziness first and foremost. It is sometimes influenced by logistics, such as no trash recepticals being available. But that’s still zero excuse, really.
The only time littering might be in any way shape or form understandable, it’d actually probably be called illegal dumping. If you’re so poor you can’t afford trash removal, you might end up resorting to illegal dumping. But again, much different than petty littering.
This is somewhat understandable if it’s something dirty like a meat packaging dripping with marinade that you don’t want to put in your bag but it almost never is. It’s a bottle, candy wrappings, juice container, chip bag etc. It was assumeably filled with something when they brought it in but they somehow can’t take it back now that it’s empty and thus lighter and packs into smaller space. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
It’s lazyness, most likely combined by the person just not caring about their environment (be it their surroundings, incluidng other people who have to live with the litter around them, or the environment). Most often than not it’s less intelligent people or people who don’t know better (like kids).