It's official. Not only am I a nosy neighbor, but meddlesome too. I couldn't help myself. Everyday I take a stroll around the campus of the small liberal arts college near my house. This entails walking the three blocks from my house to campus first, usually an uneventful trip. I say 'hello' to neighbors, notice who's moving in and who's moving out. Recently the student renters in the corner house two blocks down graduated and a new group moved in. Legally, there shouldn't be student renters in our neighborhood since it's zoned for single-family homes, but who cares. I didn't, until the grass starting growing past my knees and the garbage started piling up.

I pity the neighbors who live on this busy street. The traffic backs up at rush hour with commuters avoiding the interstate who snack while they wait and throw their wrappers out the window. On top of that, the student renters have a bus stop on their property. There's a government-owned trash can right there, but it's not emptied often enough, so bottles and cans accumulate on the ground. It must be a drag to have to keep all this picked up. But somehow the other neighbors do it.

Then something strange started happening. In addition to the odd potato chip bag or Gatorade bottle at the curb, packaging from whole McDonald's meals began to sprout right in front of the students' house. This couldn't have been thrown from the street. The students had to be getting out of their cars and instead of carrying their trash ten feet into the house, they were just dropping it, right there, on their own yard.

Like little flower pots, McDonald's bags dotted the yard and sat up on the stoop near the front door. All around the yard where the students parked their five cars, there were Molson beer bottles, some whole, some smashed to pieces; fruit juice cans, mostly flattened into thin discs; hundreds of pieces of candy wrappers and snack bags; and, oddly enough, two empty bottles of glue gel.

Some of the trash was hard to see, because the students had apparently decided they were not going to mow the whole lawn. The area where they park their cars was mowed and the strips on either side of the walkway to the front door -- but all that grass on the side of the house near the street? What for? So in Florida's subtropical rain the grass lining the sidewalk leading to campus grew and grew.

One afternoon I noticed two young men conversing on the front porch. They wore oversize designer sunglasses and chic asymmetrical haircuts. These metrosexuals are living like pigs? I wondered. I stopped to ask if they lived there. When one man said, 'yes, he does,' I told him that I would be happy to help him clean the yard. The other man looked confused, so I said the same thing again in Spanish -- there being a high likelihood around here that if English doesn't work, Spanish will. The first guy stopped me and said, "You can't talk to him in English. He doesn't speak English." Okay, so they don't speak Spanish either. I didn't get a chance to ask what they did speak, because the first guy had translated my complaint and the second was apologizing in English: "Sorry. Sorry. Okay. Okay."

I kept hoping, everyday that I walked by the next week, that something would change, but the McDonald's landscaping flourished and the grass grew above my knees.

Then last Saturday I noticed a crew hard at work on the lawn next door to the students' house. This is it, I determined. I'm taking care of this right now. I found the crew leader and asked how much it would cost for him to cut the students' lawn too. "Just the front yard," I told him. "I don't care about what's behind the fence." Forty dollars, a small price to pay for piece of mind.

I trotted home to get the cash, as well as a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. The recycling bin was too big to bring on my bike, so I would put the recyclables in my bike basket. I rang the bell to enlist the students to help, but no one answered. Four out of five cars were gone. So it was just me, stooping around. I filled up the garbage bag. I filled up my bike basket. I noticed that one of the McDonald's arrangements sprouting by the porch was really a Disney shopping bag filled halfway with trash. Somebody, at some point, had started to clean up, then lost interest. I filled that bag too.

When the lawn crew came over, the boss balked as he took a closer look at the jungle growing around the bus stop. "This is too high," he complained. "My man will kill himself when he pushes the mower through this." So now the price was $50, instead of $40. Oh, well. I paid, then placed the two bags full of garbage on the porch directly in front of the door, so the students would know that their clean yard didn't come about by magic.

What next? I'll stop by this week to let them know what it cost to do the yard, and that they can hire the neighbors' crew to keep it up for them every couple of weeks. Split among five, that shouldn't be too expensive to keep up. If they don't, I'll call code enforcement. That's a big risk for them, because not only are they not supposed to let their yard go to seed, but they shouldn't be living there as unrelated renters in the first place. I hope it doesn't come to that, though. I hope they just pay the crew and throw away their McDonald's trays and tubes of glue.

"Why are you doing this?" the Haitian crew boss asked me when I explained to him for the third time that this was not my house. "Because I can't stand it," I told him.

Because I belong to that generation bombarded by anti-littering propaganda when we were kids. In 1970, the USDA Forest Service introduced Woodsy Owl, who spouted his slogan, Give a hoot, don't pollute, during Saturday morning cartoons. The following year, Keep America Beautiful, a public-private beautification partnership founded in 1953, launched the "Crying Indian" campaign, where a sage-looking Native American surveyed a littered Western landscape while an enormous tear rolled down his weathered face. The anti-littering message was drilled into my head as deeply as my marketing-induced love of Fruit Loops and Pet Rocks.

But since then a whole lot of kids have grown up and a whole lot of immigrants have moved to this country without being indoctrinated with that message. Keep America Beautiful is still going strong, with hundreds if not thousands of local affiliates across the country, but the amount of litter on our streets, according to KAB surveys, is growing.

Why? Because, according to KAB's research, people spend more time in their cars, smoking and snacking, then throwing the stuff out the window. Because people believe some one else will come along in parks and parking lots to clean up after them. Because people don't feel ownership over public space, so they don't care.

I'd add to that list that there hasn't been a sustained nationwide campaign to end littering since the 70s. KAB and the USDA are still proud of the "Crying Indian" and Woodsy Owl -- but what's happened since then? Around here, the county is mounting a campaign right now with the abominable slogan: "Don't Trash It! Can It!" What does that even mean? Where's the cute mascot? Where's the emotional pitch?

More important, where's the connection between the old "anti-pollution" campaigns and today's ultra-popular green movement? The only updating I could see of the old message was that the Crying Indian has been Photoshopped: his wrinkles are gone! Somehow, I don't think that's enough. There should be a new campaign for an era where kids are concerned not about "pollution," but about "global warming." Then maybe hip, young people like my neighbors will see that keeping trash off the street is as important and sexy as finding the right sunglasses.