While walking my dog the other day I decided to take an informal survey of the litter dotting my route along a short stretch of Pontiac Avenue and Rolfe Street in Cranston’s Auburn neighborhood.

There were a flattened Newport cigarettes pack, two empty Red Bull energy drink cans, a filthy ruffled-cloth ponytail holder, a wind-battered coupon flier, a couple of puddles of cigarette butts, a run-over pizza box (family size) and more.

Some of the items were as small as straw wrappers, but they all added up to ugly debris that lined the curbs, blew against storefronts and got snagged in the hedges and gardens of nearby houses.

I was horrified. When I was growing up, littering was a cardinal sin in my family, and according to the social mores of the 1960s, litterbugs weren’t tolerated.

“Look at that,” my normally easygoing mother would tsk-tsk in disgust if someone in the car ahead of us tossed a paper bag or food-wrapper out the window.

She’d sigh, and taking that as a sign of tacit approval, my sister and I would lunge to crank down the green Plymouth’s windows, stick our heads out and holler “LITTERBUG!” at the offending vehicle. “Get back inside,” my mom would say after a moment or two. But we knew that since she hadn’t launched into one of her usual warnings about any of our body parts getting blown away because we were hanging outside the car, she secretly endorsed our roles as juvenile ecological police.

And that’s exactly what we were doing –– protecting the environment. Which is why I can’t understand, in this age of “going green,” nobody seems to be talking much about litter.

Hybrid cars, recycling campaigns, biofuels and wind power are center stage in the green campaign. And they are all wonderful things, but I think there’s room in the dialogue to remember anti-littering campaigns because there’s no sense in trying to save the environment if a careless and callous public insists on using the outdoors as a giant trash can.

The folks at Keep America Beautiful –– the venerable nonprofit organization dedicated to community-based improvement efforts –– agree.

“Litter is pollution,” said Rob Wallace, vice president of communications for Keep America Beautiful. “We do a lot of research here and when you ask people about what the big environmental issues are, for some reason litter is still not in the top things that people worry about.”

But they should. According to Wallace, about 80 percent of the trash that defiles our oceans originated on land and got washed to sea through failing or overflowing storm drains in heavy rains.

And litter is a self-perpetuating problem, says Wallace. Someone drops a straw wrapper, someone else drops a French fry container and soon a neighborhood looks so trashy that others don’t think twice about dropping one more piece of litter. “The thing is that these actions may seem small, but individuals need to learn about the impact they have and to have pride in where they live.”

Founded in 1953, Keep America Beautiful remains committed to helping communities improve themselves and their environment through anti-litter campaigns, beautification projects and recycling efforts. Based in Stamford, Conn., the organization gained prominence in the 1960s when it was championed by Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

I grew up during that era, and like Wallace, became a stalwart believer in “keeping America beautiful.” As were so many of that generation, I was forever moved by the organization’s award-winning 1971 television ad featuring a solemn Indian navigating his canoe to shore only to find increasing mounds of litter as he travels. The ad ends with him standing tall overlooking a highway as a careless traveler tosses a bag of trash at his feet and a lone tear runs down the proud warrior’s weathered cheek.

I don’t care that I have since found out that the actor in that ad, “Chief Iron Eyes Cody,” was actually Italian rather than Native American. But I do care that people are still throwing tons of crap out of their car windows as if it might magically disappear once it hits the earth.

Until this year, there were no local chapters of Keep America Beautiful, but I am heartened by the folks at the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council who have recently been approved as the state’s first affiliate of the national organization and who are planning a formal announcement next month. Spokeswoman Emily Soergel said tourism council president and founder Bob Billington decided that, after more than two decades of organizing clean-ups in which everything from coffee cups to an amazing amount of intact cars have been pulled from the Blackstone River, it was time to launch a cohesive anti-littering education plan in partnership with Keep America Beautiful.As for me, you won’t catch so much as a candy wrapper fluttering from my fingers as I drive along. And I have the car to prove it.

My vehicle has been a family disgrace for decades. And those who know me, and dare to ride with me, have had to become used to empty soda bottles, crumpled McDonald’s bags and half-eaten granola bars rattling around their ankles.

One of my dearest friends did take quite a while to forgive me for the time she got in my car only to sit on a tomato and stain her linen Ann Taylor skirt. It wasn’t so much the pomme d’amour that she objected to as the fact that every surface in my car was so littered with papers that she had no idea it was lurking there.

I realize that offloading the debris from my car more often would help free me of the stigma of driving a Dumpster. But hey, it’s easier to just tell the truth:

I don’t litter. And my car isn’t dirty –– it’s “green.”

bpoliche@projo.com