The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals
My husband and I recently kayaked out to Long Island in Blue Hill Bay. This 4.7 mile long island is uninhabited by humans, and we had the beach to ourselves the night we spent there. After landing on the island, we decided to explore the interior. We found an old trail and several piles of moose poop reminded us that while there may have been no humans on the island, there were certainly large mammals! But moments later, we discovered the unfortunate evidence of humans – a beer can. I found myself feeling that not only was the landscape marred, our very trip was marred by this act of careless littering.
A few minutes later, my husband pointed out another beer can, and I felt my ire grow. Ten minutes later he noticed another. This time, I just asked him not to point them out. We didn’t have a trash bag with us, and I didn’t want to be ceaselessly reminded of humanity’s less thoughtful side.
But it became harder and harder to ignore them, especially the many that hung from tree branches. By then, we were both thinking of the Blair Witch Project and wondered what creeps had decided to turn these magnificent woods into a den of freaky, hanging beer cans.
Long into the hike, we took a side trail, although trail is a strong word for what was quite challenging to follow. The beer cans gave way to what at first seemed like graffiti on trees. The letters LA had been deeply etched into a big section of one tree, followed by several trees with vertical X’s. Were these marking a path? Seemingly so.
The next morning we decided to take a another hike, although we didn’t plan to return to the beer can trail, preferring to find some other areas to explore. And what we found was magnificent. Ancient oaks, once cut at the trunk had grown sprawling and enormous. Sweet huckleberries and blueberries still clung to their stems, providing breakfast. And within 5 minutes of each other, my husband and I both found deer antlers, mine shed within the year, his quite old and gnawed by rodents.
We realized that we were getting somewhat lost, and my husband’s iPhone with its GPS was just about out of batteries. We’d forgotten a compass, and the sky had clouded up, obscuring the sun, which would have enabled us to know what direction we were heading. So we did our best to navigate back a bit uneasily. And soon enough we found one of the trails. This time, however, the beer cans were strangely reassuring, marking the trail as they did.
I can’t say I came to like the beer cans, but I did appreciate them. Hanging from branches, they stood as beacons – albeit trash beacons – and I was glad not to be lost on this large island. When we return, I will be bringing a big trash bag to gather up the refuse, but it was strange how over the course of 24 hours my response to the beer cans could go from rage to relief.
Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Image courtesy of racineur via Creative Commons.
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Filed under: Environmental Preservation, gratitude, nature, perspective | Tagged: environmental protection, hiking, irony, kayaking, littering, natural world, nature, perspective, trash, waste | Comments Off
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I just read an 
Most days, I walk my dogs, Ruby and Elsie, down to the ocean. Invariably, Elsie finds a stick to bring home, although stick is really a misnomer. Little Elsie is more likely to carry home a small tree than a stick, and Ruby and I anxiously check our backs because Elsie tears along the path with the stick, banging it into us at high speed if we’re not quick enough to scoot off the path and into the woods. Ruby has taken to jumping aside long before Elsie can ram that stick into her. This morning, I was not so quick. Elsie came up so suddenly that the stick whacked the back of my legs. I sternly said “No, Elsie,” and she looked chagrined. She begin running through the woods with it and avoiding me, but because it’s hard to carry a tree in your mouth through the woods, she changed the angle, carrying it to the side so that the length of the tree was parallel to her body rather than perpendicular to it. What a smart girl, I thought. Yet, why shouldn’t she be smart? Why should I be at all surprised that she’d modify her behavior at my command? She does it all the time.
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I was reading an article in the July/August issue of Ode Magazine titled, 
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