When we were young we were both drawn to green open spaces and enjoyed being within a treed landscape. My earliest memories as a child were of deep pleasure to be derived in such landscapes. It was certainly not that my attention was deliberately drawn by nature-loving parents to the meagre landscape of parks in a crowded city centre where my parents, struggling to get along as immigrants paid attention to bill-paying, and just surviving focused all their attention.

Now, living in another city amidst the kind of plenty that was unknown to us back then, we come counter often enough to the boredom of young people impacting the environment that is of such importance to everyone. Littering is a given, we see that in the neglect of people to pick up after themselves; with the proliferation of paper coffee cups and disposable plastic water bottles, their remnants reminding us of what an uncaring society we are.

In the wooded ravine nearby our home, we have over the years witnessed our natural surroundings being abused. There are people who regularly go through the ravine, on the other hand, picking up the litter that others leave behind in their devotion to the environment.

We've seen where young people have attempted to light fires on wood benches, bridges, tree hollows. One such blaze was successful enough for the fire department to respond. As they did several years back when we were alerted by a blaze from a tall bankside of the ravine over the main creek that sent my husband scrambling up the steep incline only to have an inebriated young man leap out of a shelter he had made of fallen branches, to protect the fire he had made. After we alerted authorities in fear of an uncontrollable blaze, he was arrested for public drunkenness and mischief and the fire department snuffed the blaze.

We've seen young men strolling along with axes, and asked them not to chop down any trees. Which does happen from time to time. Just as occasionally we will be enjoying a daily ravine circuit and become aware that someone had been there before us, snapping off the slender trunks of saplings. In the winter, particularly when school is out, young people often make ramps on the trails to make their sledding or snowboarding more exciting. The ramps, needless to say, create an impediment to people who prefer to walk, not sled or snowboard.

It was considered good sport by some young people to hurl stones at a beaver family that had settled itself several years back at another junction of the creek, where from time to time beavers tend to migrate. Although no racoons or foxes have informed us that they too have been targets, there's little doubt this is just what happens. Empathy for the wildlife that surrounds us is in miserable absence, as well.

Two days earlier when we were almost through our daily circuit I greeted a young man entering the ravine at a street junction, taking his silence for the usual morose attitude of many young people unaccustomed to civil behaviour. My husband was quicker to intuit why he was carrying long-handled garden tools with him, and suggested he not build a ramp on the trail. What would his parents say to him if they knew, he asked. To this the boy responded: They couldn't care less.

Well then, my husband responded, build a ramp in your own backyard and then see what  your parents' reaction will be. I photoed the boy, and he ducked behind a copse of trees. I had fully anticipated that the next time we'd pass that area a ramp would be there to complicate our progress, but no, although on previous occasions someone had indeed built ramps just there, this time it appears that the youth, though resentful, in the usual way that young people are when the elderly interfere with their pleasure, had had second thoughts.

For the time being, in any event.