Letter: Only a fool thinks you can ‘throw it away’

By Letter to the Editor on May 1, 2024.

Dear editor:

Re: Enviro-fools

There is no limit to human folly. April 22, 2024 was Earth Day this year. How did you observe Earth day? In Irvine, some time that day, a fool dumped a presumably defunct dishwasher kitchen appliance down a steep, rocky slope off the road, very near the Ross Creek Bridge. It came to rest near the creek bed. Cypress County maintains a municipal dump about a kilometre away. The fool’s taxes, in part, pay for this municipal dump, at which there is a designated area for unloading unwanted appliances, for recycling. I guess the fool doesn’t believe in getting their tax money’s worth. The big picture, civic responsibility, environmental integrity and common decency are all unfathomable concepts to the fool, and that is why they are a fool.

Four days earlier, another fool (or perhaps the same one?) threw a large, rectangular plastic tote box, containing animal guts, off the Ross Creek Bridge, into the currently dry creek bed. Their mother did not teach them that, I’ll bet. Fools are not born foolish. They develop a bizarre, unjustified sense of entitlement, from where I do not know.

Decent people in society aren’t asking fools to do rocket science, or neurosurgery. Each day, I either walk or bicycle the same one-kilometre route, twice crossing the Ross Creek Bridge, and, during every week, on both sides of that bridge, I remove between one and two dozen pieces of litter/garbage from ditches and the creek bed along that stretch. Multiply that one kilometre by the number of kilometres of road in Canada, and the problem is obvious to all but those both self-absorbed and obtuse. Every piece of debris is in someone’s hand before it is discarded. It does not throw itself away. Moreover, unthinking fools can not comprehend that there is no “away” – that nothing can be thrown “away” – someone else, some time in the future must deal with their folly.

Yours truly,

Gregory R. Côté

Irvine

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