A good friend of mine enjoys teasing me for moving into the thrilling viral content world of making videos about picking up litter. He thinks I should be doing something bigger and more important with my time, and that moaning about litter is a very privileged thing to be worrying about given the state of the world right now. With what’s on our TV screens and the health services on the verge of overwhelm, haven’t I got anything better to do than grumble about a few skellies throwing a crisp packet away in the woods?

But here’s why. I secretly think that this discarded crisp packet is the key to saving the world. Hear me out. Why does somebody drop a crisp packet in the woods? Maybe if they ate an apple and lobbed the core away, we’d be starting to tackle the overwhelming problems of bad diet leading to poor health, leading to overcrowded hospitals. Perhaps instead of that crisp, the crisp packet is also an indicator of not just our bad diets but also an unawareness of what goes into food, where our food comes from, and the impact of our food choices on the environment.

Even if we stopped all the world’s bad fossil fuel stuff today, the planet will still go over the one and a half degree temperature warning threshold simply through the food choices we make and the disastrous food system we’ve ended up with. Some people might see the crisp packet in the woods and tut at the bad behaviour of the lout who left it there, then go home and be a good citizen and drop their own crisp packet in the bin. But what’s the difference really? In the grand scheme of things, is a crisp packet lying in the woods, made of plastic and not likely to biodegrade for centuries, any worse than a crisp packet that I throw in the bin which gets carted off to a landfill site or burned or shipped off to some poor country for poor people to deal with? It doesn’t seem much better really, does it?

So, this then raises questions about our single-use throwaway lifestyles: buy stuff, use it, chuck it away. Repeat. The implications and ripples from that are undeniable. It’s also worth considering why I’m seen as such a good boy because I take my litter home or pick up other people’s litter, yet lots of other people don’t. Who dropped this crisp packet, and why did they do it?

There are many reasons, of course, but I think a lot of them fall under the umbrella of nature disconnection. Have people become disconnected from the wild world, feeling no sense of belonging or responsibility? If we don’t care about the natural world, then we’re unlikely to take action, live lifestyles, or make votes that put the planet as a priority. While we’re in the midst of a very existential crisis due to the way we’re treating the planet, tackling people’s disconnection from nature feels critical to me if we are to get people engaged enough to care and make the changes that nature, society, and the world so desperately need.

So why is our crisp packet dropper so disconnected from the world that they drop their crisp packet on this shortcut through the woods between the town and the shops? There are all sorts of villains we can blame here for our sedentary, indoor, sheltered, inactive, antiseptic, sterilised lifestyles. There are also big issues of access, with so much of the countryside fenced off from the common man. There’s less space to roam, to wander, to learn to love and care for nature. Our countryside is not equally accessible to everyone, and that inequality and injustice is linked to some of the other problems I’ve talked about here.

And so yes, my friend does have a point. When I’m out here, picking up litter rather than campaigning to end wars or searching for a cure to heart disease that will save millions, I don’t deny that whatever I do will be insignificant, but it feels important that I do it. This crisp packet is connected to the lifestyles our society has slipped into living that are so disastrous for our physical and mental health and for the health of nature and the planet. If we don’t sort out what we’re doing to the climate and the natural world, then the problems that are coming down the line in terms of famines, mass migrations, and the collapse of soil and agriculture suddenly start to look to me like issues that are worth spending my days banging on about.