I spent Earth Day driving from New York to Maine. The snow is gone and the bare ground is in limbo between winter and spring. And with no natural element to mask the roadside trash, I was struck with how we misuse, exploit and insult our planet with reckless abandon.

I saw plastic bags in trees and in ditches from 84 to 295. I watched black smoke burp from truck after truck. I watched as people chucked their cigarette butts and plastic baggies out their car windows.

When I stopped for gas on the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts, I was greeted by a graveyard of discarded fast food containers, big gulps, lids, plastic water bottles, plastic bags, butts, butts and more butts that wrapped around the perimeter of the gas station and extended into what would otherwise be a scenic little stream. It looked as though cars were just sweeping through their front and back seats, and their trunks and tossing out the contents. Never mind that not 25 yards away sat a multitude of trash cans.

I once wrote an article for The Boston Globe about marinas around the North Shore of Massachusetts, and their efforts to “green up” their facilities. As part of my reporting, I interviewed someone from the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management agency. My contact there gave me a quote that I have paraphrased many times since, “treat the ocean, the earth like you would treat your kitchen floor.”

In other words, if you drop something on the kitchen floor while you are making dinner do you leave it there or do you pick it up?

Pick it up, people.

It’s so simple. It may literally be the easiest step we can take to treat our planet with a little respect. It costs nothing. It is painless.

I spent Easter morning sitting in the sun by a lake with an E.B. White essay collection. I read. I watched two joy-filled dogs romp and roll and swim. I listened to a green frog as it welcomed spring, to the raucous call of a Pileated woodpecker and to the occasional splash of the bass that hide amongst the grasses and lily pads in the shallows.

As blissful as that morning was, my drive on Tuesday was a stark reminder of how precious and increasingly rare those moments are becoming. That the little ecosystem of the woodpecker and the frog and the bass could be irreparably damaged in an instant—and that such an event isn’t out of the ordinary.

So on this ordinary day I am ranting for the Earth and asking, on its behalf, for a little respect.

-Jesse Nankin