How to stay in shape and continue to be useful to the environment.

Contact with nature is a form of reconciliation with oneself, a calming for the mind and a medicine for our body.

Whether you are a lover of running in the woods or in the countryside or in parks, or you like walking slowly with friends or family in the mountains or on the trails in the plains, on the beaches or in other natural areas, what matters is to live in symbiosis with nature.

Whether it's cold or hot, rainy or sunny, day or night, every moment of the seasons and days can give unforgettable moments to your time.

Colors, scents, lights, shadows, flowers, animals, rocks, landscapes, villages, everything will remind you, even after a long time, of the pleasant moments that you have lived alone, as an intimate experience, or in the company of other people.

Unfortunately, nature has always been used, raped, despised for ignorance, money, aridity and indifference by a part of the population, who use it by destroying, day after day, the environment.

We have passed, however, from a long period of apathy towards the problem, to a progressive awakening, where people have decided to do something to reverse this dangerous decline.

We began to see groups of young people who, equipped with garbage bags and gloves, walked on the beaches to collect the waste that the apparently carried ashore.

We saw friends who met in city parks, independently, for a day of cleaning the green spaces, from waste, syringes and abandoned objects.

We have seen families, individuals or groups of people walking along the mountain, countryside, hill paths, with a bag attached to the backpack, to collect, without no set schedule or obligation, the rubbish that others leave lying around.

The sense of the environment, civil life and ecology shines through these private, individual or collective initiatives, where a place is cleaned without anyone having it ask, for ourselves and also for those who dirty, to the detriment of yourself and everyone.

In a period of neologisms this physical-environmental activity has taken the name of Plogging, a definition with which an outdoor sport is identified, running or walking, with the added purpose of collecting abandoned waste.

Plogging can also become a social re-education, an expiation of a penalty imposed for abandoning waste, a true and punishable crime, which many perhaps do not know that exists.

From cigarette butts thrown on the ground, to water bottles to the remains of the pizza box or to the cans of soft drinks left at the foot of the benches, they are all crimes which constitute damage to the community.

Plogging could be the right penalty for these people, who will be able for a few days to walk along the paths, the streets of the cities, the public parks, the beaches collecting the rubbish that people like them have left lying around.

I believe it can be educational, constructive and democratic to spend days repairing the mistakes that are made, because the environment is not your thing but it is an asset of everyone and, therefore, it takes respect.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.