Ah, April! What a great month to be alive! The flowers are blooming, trees are growing green with foliage, and, of course, love is in the air. Yet where is the love for our Mother Earth? It seems that we have taken for granted her splendor and sheer beauty, especially here at Ray’s Place. Each morning I make the trek from the Science and Allied Health Building over to Muntz Hall, and without fail there they are, Phillip Morris’s army of loyal subjects, smoking away. Now, before anyone gets upset with me, I am not coming down on smoking, because that is obviously a personal decision. Yet, when I cross paths with the tumble weed of today rolling by to infiltrate all the areas I hold beautiful, needless to say I become a little hot under the collar. I do, however, understand that sometimes it isn’t a purposely perpetrated act of degradation; some people have just gotten into the habit of pitching their butts on the ground.
It is the same as those who pitch their soda cans into the trash when there is a recycling bin marked “CANS ONLY” sitting right next to it. It is a force of habit, but just like smoking it is a bad habit. On the bright side of the issue, it is a lot easier to throw your trash in the appropriate receptacles than it is to kick that nagging desire to suck down one last “cancer stick” before class.
Well, as some of you may have gathered by now, I am somewhat of a naturalist. I have a strong passion for all things living and would like for my kids to be lucky enough to experience them as I have. Although in the current state of affairs, it seems holistic issues concerning our Earth have been put on the back burner.
It doesn’t have to stay like this; we can do something about it. We can start by consciously recycling bottles, cans, papers, and plastics.
Not too complicated of an idea, right? Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Albeit simple, it is still not in full swing here at Ray’s. Actually, on the RWC campus, it is in more of a dull funk.
Some of you might be saying, “Jeez, I see those blue bins everywhere!” This is true; they are visible and fairly frequent for the most part, but they aren’t an incorporated agenda in student’s lives, especially when there are roughly ten vending machines dispensing plastic bottles, and there are exactly zero recycling bins for plastic. What am I to do with that 20-ounce bottle of freedom that I nimbly purchased on campus? Well, right now I have to take it home to recycle, which in retrospect simply means stash it in my car until there are so many of them that I have to clean my car out.
This doesn’t have to be our only course of action. We can come together as a community and bug those wonderful folks in the Student Government to do something about it! Earth Day is today, April 22, which is a perfect opportunity to shed some loving down on Mother Earth and make a plea to the Student Government for better use of our recycling program! Or you can start small by putting this paper in the nearest recycling bin, of which there are at least 12 that I have counted.