EDITOR,
Pack it in. Pack it out.
Thank you to all dog walkers, cigarette smokers, beer drinkers, and glass bottle beverage imbibers, who clean up after themselves when enjoying the trails, beaches and other recreation sights Squamish area provides for your free use. By binning the dog doo bags, cigarette butts, beer cans and glass bottles, you are respecting the wonderful opportunity this area has provided for generations of people and wildlife. Fortunately, there are numerous bear-proof garbage bins located at entrances to trails and beaches, making it easy to dispose of all garbage, even the diapers, chip bags, fast food wrappers.
Thank you to the trail users, beach walkers, and recreationalists who take the time to clean up after people who are too lazy, uneducated, hurried, and rude when they leave bags, butts, cans and bottles strewn about these public-use places. Do they throw garbage on the floor or ground in their own homes?
For your information:
• Dog doo bags — Respectfully provided by DOS for free at trailheads. They are not biodegradable. Plastic bags remain as particles of plastic upon the land and blown into the waterways.
• Cigarette butts — Smokers pay a lot of money for these plastic bits, only to cast them off as litter. Butts left on the shorelines of rivers, lakes and oceans end up in the tidal influenced watercourses, imitating the movement of food sources for fish or eventually end up on the islands of plastic in the oceans. Recycling butts is a growing trend. It is easy to carry a small butt pouch or even baggie to collect butts for disposal at home. Beaches and forests are not ashtrays.
• Beer and soda cans — More money cast away. These recyclable items are much lighter to carry out than to carry in. They can be crushed and popped into a pocket for disposal into a recycle bin.
• Glass bottles — Imagine enjoying a day at the beach with your kids or dogs. Someone has thrown a glass bottle into a fire pit. Eventually, the broken glass ends up downstream, sometimes in the water, sometimes on land, sometimes under the foot of a child or dog. (Fishhooks are nasty weapons too.)
It is easy to put the empty bottle back into the backpack or bag it was carried in with.
Please, when enjoying the front and backcountry, leave it better than you found it.
Glenne Campbell
Brackendale
