My wife and I are commuters. We take a 40-minute drive to school and walk up the steps in front of Herr House and into the back of Thompson, cigarette butts lining every inch of our path.
I am an asthmatic and I have learned throughout my life to cope with cigarette smoke and air pollution. One thing I have never been used to is littering.
The habitual flick a large number of smokers use to rid themselves of their addiction after their final inhale is almost a classic. The slight pinch between their fingers, the flick, and the movement of their foot as they step on the cigarette and twist their ankle slightly.
These remains litter the streets, curbs and sidewalks of every city I have ever stepped into. Parkville and the Park University campus are no exception. Large numbers of smokers can often be found behind Thompson during break periods or in the mornings and even though trash cans and areas to dispose of cigarettes are in plain sight, there always seems to be more butts on the ground or in the empty stone planters surrounding the area than anywhere else.
It is no secret that cigarettes are toxic and have very harmful effects on both the human body and the environment. While it is hard to imagine their harmful effects on the environment 10 or 20 years in advance, it should be painfully obvious to any environmentally conscious person that there will be harmful effects.
One of the primary reasons I chose Park as my school was for its beautiful surroundings and for the number of active people around the community running near the lake in the morning, afternoon and evening. It is tough to imagine a version of Parkville with these surroundings in misuse, let alone a version without these surroundings at all.
Park University may not be my home like it is too many of the students on campus, but it is my school. I would like future students and children growing up in the surrounding area to have the same lush surroundings available to us right now. Luckily, achieving this goal is not hard.
The continual preservation of Park University and its surroundings is not a hard task. If you are smoking, eating a meal from a disposable container or using any other disposable product, don’t throw it on the ground, even if a trash can is not immediately available.
Holding your trash for another minute will require very little effort on your behalf. It will help to preserve our environment, our wildlife and our future.
