By: Gabrielle McLaren, Editor-in-Chief

After I wrote my last exam, I figured I needed some sunshine and fresh air to feel alive again, so I cut through the AQ’s courtyard. You know, the pretty one on all the promotional materials that made you think, “Wow, this is the university for me!”

The courtyard was beautiful as always. Picturesquely, folks were studying and conversing on the grass, somebody was napping on a bench, the grass was green, the birds were chirping . . . Because of who I am as a person, I wondered if the koi fish were back. So as I crossed the pond, I looked over the walkway and what did I see?

Trash. Literal trash — which I feel the need to specify given how often we use this adjective to describe all things SFU. The sun had been out for all of three minutes, the koi fish had just been released, and somebody had already thrown an empty plastic soda cup into the pond along with assorted candy bar wrappers.

Let me be clear here: there is no legitimate reason to pollute campus. There’s no reason to pollute any place, really. It costs $0 to hold onto your trash until you find a garbage or recycling bin, and if you’re enough of an adult to be on this campus you should know better than to litter. But doing it as soon as the weather clears up enough for people to step outside and enjoy nature seems particularly hateful. We already talk trash about our campus and how ugly it is; we have no reason to make it trashier.

So to the random pond-polluters out there: stop. We can all do better than this to take care of our school and the planet until the incoming ecological apocalypse takes us all out of our misery.