I moved from Texas to California, and shortly after crossing the border into California, I saw my first litter warning sign with fine amount posted. On this sign was also the fine for abandoning an animal. The litter fine was significantly higher than abandoning an animal. I was kind of appalled at the fact.
I guess my trip was probably biased towards states with lots of parks and forests, who probably had more incentive to protect their local environments.
Oh, mostly the forest-y and nature-y states - Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, California...I would've liked to see more of Montana and Michigan, but it gets cold up there in the winters.
Mostly I drove through Texas to avoid Oklahoma (one of my least favorite states), but the Guadalupe Mountains were very nice.
I'm not sure I'd call it 'clean' though; the air seemed awfully smoggy and I saw almost as many flaring wells as I did in North Dakota. But there were lots of open spaces and the people were friendly.
Washington, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Utah get my vote for the best places to do a parks/forests vacation, depending on your interests.
The air was “smoggy” driving through Texas? Uh huh... I’m going to go ahead and put that on the same level as your claim about Texas being lax on litter penalties.
By the way, Texas has more acres of forest land than every state you mentioned as being nature-y and forest-y and having more incentive to care about the environment. The only state with more forest than Texas is Alaska.
Like someone else said, Texas is too big to make generalizations.
Primary school in rural Texas. We'd spend an hour a day singing songs mostly about how much God blesses Texas, America, and the Marine Corps, then finish off with The Eyes of Texas song.
In our version, The Eyes ended up in the kitchen watching Dinah. She was about to blow her horn, thus ending the mandate of The Eyes. We would plead for her not to do such a thing, for her sake, for our sake, for goodness sake! The Eyes would know.
And I chuckled at how they used the "Don't mess with Texas" phrase despite having much lower littering fines than most other states.
Like with everything else in this country, it's all about the marketing.