If you can no longer see your discarded items, you don’t have to worry about them, right? Unfortunately, that’s a sentiment held by many of us in this country, and others all over the world. For generations, we’ve used our lakes, ponds, rivers and oceans, even our abandoned quarries, as great disposal places for everything from household trash to no longer wanted vehicles or appliances.

Slowly but surely, we’re beginning to see the damage we’ve done and to make changes. Much of the problem has to do with education. We’re coming to understand the error of our ways, and thank goodness are working hard to teach young children how marine debris is impacting our environment. Just recently, young folks attending the Sea and Science Center in East Boothbay studied the issue in conjunction with the nonprofit Rozalia Project dedicated to cleaning up our oceans.

Thanks to scientists at our own Bigelow Lab, we’re finding out that plastics not only pollute our oceans, but human beings as well, since some plastic residue gets into the food chain and into our bodies.

In addition to the debris we intentionally discard, our oceans are filled with everything imaginable as the result of floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Just watch some of the survival shows on TV and see how many “goodies’’ are picked up on beaches and shorelines miles from civilization. It’s like a garage sale: tarps, clothing, shoes, pots and pans, doors, large sections of a roof, etc. Those who volunteer locally to clean up our shoreline will tell you they never know what they’re going to find.

When we were growing up, the amount of junk that went overboard was mind-boggling. Fishermen and boaters were guilty of discarding anything they no longer needed over the side to rest on the ocean bottom. They weren’t alone. Anyone who had easy access to the water used it as a dumping ground.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a young man died in a quarry in Sullivan further down the coast. It closely followed a drowning in a quarry elsewhere in the country, and the accompanying news story reminded us of the hidden dangers. An overhead camera shot showed a large piece of road equipment in a quarry, pointing out that someone jumping in that particular spot could have been killed instantly and that we rarely know what’s beneath the surface anywhere, be it the ocean, river, quarry or any other body of water.

We’re optimistic that today’s young people won’t make the mistakes of their parents, grandparents and others before them. It’s taken us a long time to learn the importance of our waterways the world over and why they need to be protected.