Editor: I love living in the Murrayville area and walk almost every day along Old Yale Road and up Fraser Highway.
The rural nature of this area awes me, from the cranes perched atop the fence posts, to the young coyote that sat in the middle of the road while I walked toward him, to the honking of the Canada geese. Sometimes I see a deer family or come upon a raccoon that hasn’t noticed me. How lucky we are to live in this environment.
Sometimes on television we see newscasts of other countries and marvel at the amount of trash in the streets, and see the children picking through for valuables.
We have a valuable landscape, which we should protect. It begins by teaching our children to not litter.
Styrofoam coffee cups, plastic lids and slurpee cups – the list is endless – do not break down and turn back into the earth.
They degrade in the sun and break down into pieces so small that we can’t see them. But they are there, ruining our world and being eaten up by local birds and animals. In the past week, I have picked up over 100 pounds of litter and trash. How sad that we ruin our living environment this way.
Our generation has done some things that will have a long-term negative effect on our world, but perhaps the youth, whose world it will be for a long time, can take their garbage home and dispose of it in the right way – to benefit the natural environment and ultimately themselves.
Valerie Caskey,
Langley