Start showing respect for city’s nature reserves

Cottonwood Reserve and Park is being trashed. Literally. The amount of garbage that is accumulating there daily is insulting and makes our city look bad, to say nothing of how it affects the grassland birds and wildlife that live there.

I am weary of picking up trash for 30 minutes every day before beginning my daily hike. Flyers, aluminium cans, cigarette butts, Tim Hortons cups, etc. are all piling up there and it is nothing short of disgraceful. Who are these people who keep insisting on tossing their garbage out the window when there is a perfectly good (and empty, I might add) bin just beside the parking lot?

The fields surrounding Cottonwood are also full of trash. I noticed today a discarded Christmas tree in the ditch. This is not an item you casually toss away; someone drove out there with the express purpose of getting rid of it. This shows an extraordinary level of disrespect for the area and frankly I am sick of it. Dogs are not allowed in Cottonwood either. Almost daily, I express this fact to people walking dogs there and almost without fail they come at me with attitudes of beligerence and entitlement.

There is not a shortage of places in Lethbridge to walk your dog; you do not need to bring them to the nature reserves. Further to this, people not only bring their dogs along they are not picking up after them. The amount of dog droppings in Cottonwood is especially infuriating when one shouldn’t be bringing their dogs there to begin with. Deer will be having fawns soon, rattlesnakes will be prowling, and porcupines are common there. It’s not even safe to bring your dogs there.

If we do not start showing our nature reserves the respect and dignity they deserve, what will become of them?