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What people don't understand about litter is that nature doesn't care what you drop on the ground.
Let me repeat that: Nature. does. not. care.
Nature doesn't care if you litter. It doesn't. Get it through your heads.
The reason we don't litter is actually the same reason that we don't steal. It's because we live in society with which we have made several social agreements/contracts about morality and acceptable behavior. Additionally, we consider that our "human domain" extends to wherever groups of people (minimally, just yourself) might ever go to. We keep the streets clean, not for the sake of sorted and speedy bio-degradation of our trash. We keep the streets clean because clean streets look better. The fact that the orange peel is biodegradable is absolutely irrelevant to the conversation.
Do you drop orange peels and other bio-waste into a rose garden at the front of your house? No. You put them into a compost heap behind your shed. It's not hard to understand why. They are ugly, they take a long time to naturally (and totally) disappear, and they smell bad while decomposing. Moreover, animals do NOT eat many of these things, such as banana peels and orange peels, so they just sit there, looking like garbage.
Take a look at this graffiti on these rocks. Paint is not considered litter by most people's definition. Yet, this is unacceptable. Why? Because it offends our society's sense of aesthetics. We believe that there is an inherent difference between types of places. Cities have lots of buildings, roads and traces of human use. We take our garbage to places called dumps and we agree that it's OK to leave it there since no one lives there to care about it. The place called nature, we all believe, should look opposite of cities, in terms of scars on the environment done by humans. Dropping things that are UNnatural to that environment, which will STAY looking like that for 1-2 years before disappearing on their own, is considered littering and is bad.
