Here are some excerpts from the letters to the editor that we recently got from Burley Middle School students:
"If people litter and species become endangered [it] can make another species overpopulated. If litter killed down snakes then hawks would become endangered also…Nature can help this planet in any way so if we don’t have nature this planet can be in danger. Another reason we should care about nature is because they are our food source. And plants gives us oxygen. And without all of this the human race will end."
That’s from seventh-grader Cody Morris, who obviously has a handle on ecology that many of our national leaders seem to lack.
Brian Young points out that "Virginia’s effort to recycle is not enough to compare to how much Virginia makes in trash," and suggests that we could "make a deal that every item you recycle you get a cent or two." Sign me up. Breyanna Guadarrama chimes in: "The amount of trash that is generated by Americans is estimated at 250 million tons of solid waste a year. That obviously is way too much." Obvious to a middle-schooler, anyway!
And finally, from Anne DeLanoy: "Have a compost container and when the trash-man comes he can also pick up the compost container and take the compost to a composting place. So that the trash-man knows which container is which, the compost container will be labeled with the words COMPOST."
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
