Shuttered

Forest Hill. Like many large million dollar plus houses in the neighborhood, this one has plastic shutters that are purely decorative (or anti-decorative, more accurately).

Bottle nest

I found this lovely nest of bottles just off the trail in one of Toronto’s busiest ravine trails. Cities face a long list of difficult challenges, from homelessness to balancing pedestrian, bike and car traffic. Making sure that trash gets remivod from parks before it begins to look like an ancient artifact shouldn’t be that hard, especially for a wealthy city filled with people who understand that littering is bad (not a common view in many parts of the world). So what’s the problem here? All shared property risks falling into the tragedy of the commons, but over time people have found ways to mitigate many of these problems. In an age of facile social communication and group action, why do we still take dumps without wiping up after ourselves?