Our weekend travels took us to Scales Pond in South Freetown. We toured the International Children’s Memorial Place, explored the infrastructure left over from the pond’s old life as driver of a hydro-electric generating station, and then crossed the road and walked along a trail that runs down the Dunk River:

It took a while for me to connect the presence of the “No Fishing” signs stuck up everywhere with last month’s Dunk River fish kill — it was Catherine who noticed the odd fact of there being no fish in the river at all.

The ocean being ever-present here, I don’t usually think of PEI as having a freshwater ecosystem, but it obviously does. I’m as aware as the next guy about how hard it is to wean from a chemical economy, and you’d be hard-pressed to call me a nature lover, but when you walk along a stunning river on a warm summer day and realize that the river has been stripped of life so that we might eat properly-sized french fries, you gotta wonder about our priorities as a society.