Raising Outdoor Kids: Teach them to pick up one piece of litter every day

Before

After

With spring comes many changes in Calgary. The days are longer, the weather is warmer and you can enjoy both by getting outside and having fun after supper. It's also the time of year when the snow  begins its final melt, revealing a winter's worth of litter on the ground underneath.

Imagine how much less litter there would be if everyone picked up just one piece of litter every day. With a population of over a million people, that would translate to 365 million fewer pieces of garbage on the ground. Now extend that across Canada...

Growing up, I learned to do this by watching my father. Whether we were running errands in the city or out for a walk in the woods, he would pick up pretty much every piece of garbage he came across. It's not that he was a rabid environmentalist, either. A conservative with a small C, taking care of your environment and being a good citizen were just the right things to do. (Seems to me Alberta's and Canada's big C Conservatives could learn a thing or too from my dad, but that's a post for a different blog.)

I'm somewhat less diligent in this regard than he was, but hopefully my kids are still learning to pick up garbage by watching me. Just in case they aren't, when they get home from school today I'll have "the talk" with them--and then we'll go outside and put those words into action as we play.