Act like you care a little bit and clean up after yourselves.
Snapping turtles are endangered on turtle island and are vital to our ecosystem.
The duck that died of starvation and asphyxiation because of a carabiner that got stuck around its beak.
The squirrel that got wrapped in a discarded fishing net with its baby, bodies floating netted in the river.
The 1000 year old tree that was illegally sawed down and the many chipmunks, birds and other critter creatures that fell into the water with a massive, heavy, devastating crash - killed all the animals in the tree with the force alone. Stunned and drowned in the water below or crushed under the weight of the branches and trunk. It also caused the river to rise and destroy ecosystems on the riverbank, that 1000+ year old tree had created a natural bank stabilization and riparian buffering. That root mass holds soil together, slows floodwater, traps sediment. Remove the tree and you lose that armoring, so banks slump, water undercuts, and you get flashier flooding and erosion.
Southern Ontario like many other places in Turtle Island (North America) was recently covered in an orange brown haze of wildfire smoke, and then I saw and heard all of this over the next few days along the edge of the river.
This turtle pushed me to my breaking point.
Clean up after yourself, stop consuming unnecessarily especially for the sake of minor convenience (do you really need another plastic tool to make your hair look instagram ready? Do you need plastic wrap or can you use wax organic paper that can decomposes after many years of use and YES still seals things), respect the damn land, without whom you would not f*cking survive. Treat it like family because it is. Treat it like you care about the future generations that come after you and not like you care about your singular individual experience for a damn day. Take the extra time to make sure you aren’t financially supporting corrupt monopolies that destroy us. (This does not apply to people who have no other options, eg. rural folk who only have 1-2 options).
And to the fisherman and travellers who like to say they are in harmony with the land, you need to be more mindful of what the yell you leave behind. We all have an ECO FOOTPRINT. Anytime you walk a piece of land, or travel through the water, try to leave it the same as OR better than when you arrived. To those who catch and release, I see the slow death you often leave behind in the river. Fish for resources and allow the life to have dignity, appreciate the reciprocity, let it sustain us - eat it, use its bones - you are not helping and are not being humane by throwing it back to die slowly and unnecessarily. Stop treating life like it can be sported and gamed.
The animals and the land give their entire lives to support us everyday. And this is what we do. This is what you do. This is what I do. We are all guilty.