A couple of days ago I left an interesting picture up on my Facebook page. You can check out the picture for yourself but it made me and countless others giggle hysterically. Of course that was minutes before I took a leisurely walk through the campus to go get something to eat...
Yeah, so what I found was this party poster blasted all over the campus. And to my utter dismay, someone had taken the time to douchingly tape these posters to the trees on campus. Yes, tape.... super thick packing tape. They went around the tree three times.
So this makes me think back to a conversation I had with our campus groundskeeper a couple of years ago. Benoit and I had a nice talk about how many trees die on campus because of the negligence of the people around us. Every year there are people that break branches off of trees to pretend that they are wands; or strip the leaves from the trees to keep as souvenirs; or even damage the bark of the trees to hang posters and banners.
Two years ago I even had a group of students create a tree user guide for the uOttawa campus - you know, simple stuff about how not to hurt nature. Some of the things they discovered about how people use trees on campus was astounding (remind me to get that up on our website).
I only want to profess this one simple message to all you would be poster maniacs out there... seriously, don't put posters on trees. We have posts to put them on and these posts are placed along high traffic corridors. People will see your message. Taping a poster to a tree risks not only damaging the tree, but it also gets people like me to call out bars (like Le Bop) to clean up their acts and stop risking our trees for their advertising needs!
-jON
http://thesustainabilitree.blogspot.com
