Poverty is an age old problem. It's been around since the beginning of man. Most people in the world, like the area posted in Telluride, are only interested in surviving from one day to the next. They have no concept of nature, cleanliness, sanitation, and lack education. Education, on the other hand, does not necessarily breed respect for the environment.
We teach it in school, we try to live it in the community, and yet there are those who just never get it.
We boondocked outside of the south entrance to the Grand Canyon in 2014 in a Forest Service area. We still found trash and people who, even though it was well-posted about forest fires, had their late night campfires raging up to the lower boughs of the pines.
The best we can do is to set the example, clean up after others when possible and within reason, report areas that are being abused, and hope that through education and law enforcement things will improve.
I can say that what once existed in terms of a happy retirement no longer exist. There are over 1.5 million Americans now living in Mexico and after 32 years here I can tell you they aren't coming for the culture. They're coming because if they were to stay in the U.S. or Canada they would be dead a#$ broke. Very hard to live on a pension of $1000 or less and I have met many who had much, much less than that.
Why do I mention that? There has been a proliferation of people moving into van life, used rvs, cheap rv living, and the like because there is nowhere else to go. It is an accumulation of all of the above and adding into the mix the high number of drug addicts, forgotten veterans who suffer from mental illness brought on by war and abandoned families.
Follow some of the YouTubers who live fulltime in vans and Class Cs as they show you the real America where run down, beaten up rvs line the streets of western cities.
The problem of poverty is much bigger than we think. I agree with Dan, I don't like what I see but I'm just not sure what the approach should be to get it all cleaned up.
