Plastic?

Today, at the  ever-surprising space that is my observation spot, there is melted plastic covering a lot of the steps. Tuesday night, while walking out of Erdman, I saw a small fire inside the circle. I didn't react to it because I could hear people around it and they did not seem concerned. Maybe they were burning some particularly nasty graded assignment or conducting an experiment or getting rid of a bad memory. I don't know. I guess I figured they must have had a reason.

I was going to write about the effects of the snow and I didn't think the fire was important, but as of today I had to change my mind. To my surprise, these people were apparently burning something made of plastic. Why would anyone ever do this, you ask? Again, I don't know. Burning plastics, as a lot of this class probably already knows, releases some pretty harmful things into the air. The toxins can be distributed in soil, water, or on plants and become very dangerous for us and other animals even after cleaning. I'm a little worried about this and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now. I threw away what I could, but a lot of toxins could still be lying around, ready to reach the animals that come there to scavenge and hunt. I've asked previously in my sits whether or not my presence was detrimental to the space I occupied because I thought it might be selfish to use a space I was hurting to produce writing assignments, but I said I would stop thinking that way. However, I'm back to thinking about humanity's effect on the environment (understandably) because there is melted plastic in a place where there should never be any sort of plastic and humans are responsible for it. 

I think my next goal, stemming from this situation, is to make sure that if I am going to continue to occupy this space, I will remove the negative effects of other people. I think the residents of Erdman have enough spaces of their own that they don't have to spread out harmfully into the space of other animals. If they don't have a space to burn plastic, they honestly just shouldn't burn plastic.