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It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening, and all I want is my Sunday Sundae. I leave the cozy cocoon of my dorm to brave the cold on the way to Annenberg Hall expecting the usual: a picture-perfect walk through Harvard Yard to the Science Center Plaza. Instead, I am bombarded by piles of trash spewing from too few containers.

There are only two prominent trash cans on my walk between Wigglesworth Hall and the Science Center. This arrangement causes big problems — especially on weekends. Beyond sidestepping posing tourists and the errant Bluebike, students are left to pass overflowing trash in front of the Science Center gate.

There are two things we could do to solve this. But I think the garbage issue points to something more perverse in our campus culture.

The first solution to the trash problem is straightforward: Yard Operations could simply put out more trash cans or collect the trash from the cans more often. A couple more cans hidden in a corner wouldn’t ruin Harvard’s classic charm.

And two, in the meantime, Harvard students could quit dodging plastic bags and start picking them up. I noticed the mess, of course. So did everyone around me. How could you not? There were Blank Street coffee cups rolling about, trash drawers jammed full, and a Jenga stack of take-out containers adorning the metal bin.

We students could do something about it: Bend your knees, reach toward a piece of garbage, pick it up, carry it to the nearest waste receptacle, place it in said receptacle, and repeat.

The fact that we don’t speaks to a deeper issue at Harvard: We don’t care enough about short-term problems.

There’s a pressure at Harvard to be the next big thing. Solve this, fix that, invent something new. In the process, we’ve lost sight of what we can do now. If every day, everyone would pick up the trash they see, the overflowing garbage would be gradually rerouted to other trash cans in the Science Center Plaza.

Yet no one does.

Because to be impactful (or so the conventional wisdom goes), it must also be large scale. If looking past the small things lets you save energy for future problems, the tradeoff seems obvious.

In my hometown in rural, tiny West Virginia, we have highway clean-up crews and local community member volunteers doing beautification projects. This doesn't solve every environmental issue, of which there are many in Appalachia, but at least it’s a start.

Paying attention to the little things gives us the incentive to look further. Taking the extra 20 seconds to grab a Tatte cup (or hold onto yours a few extra feet) won’t prevent you from winning a Nobel Prize, and in the meantime, it may teach you to care more about your surroundings. Campus mess might seem like an insignificant issue — but it’s a solvable one.

Indeed, by forgetting about our short-term impacts, we contribute to the problems we are trying to solve. Despite the plethora of Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrators at Harvard, we don’t seem to value our own environment as much as we do distant ones.

I catch myself moving past things I could easily fix — a fallen poster, my own overflowing dorm trash, a forgotten container on a Lamont Library table — because I have somewhere I need to be, another problem set to finish. Those places will still be gotten to, and those things will be finished, even if I fix these small things. And our environment would be all the better for it.

I have no doubt that Harvard houses the next generation of change-makers and do-gooders. The next president, the next Fields medalist, the next-big-research-breakthrough maker. But those things take time to get to.

Until then, we can pick up some trash.

Margot I. Cerbone ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.