Burning Issue

Today I was going for my usual run thru Shadyside. Along the way I observed a lady smoking, finish her cigarette, and dispose of it onto the street. Ok, that's littering, but it's not what irked me; she did it in close proximity to a massive pile of leaves. It was a rather windy day too. Now it doesn't take a genius to find the problem in this.
However this isn't even the problem. It stired a memory from last summer.
I was in Washington State and just finished my NOLS course- 1 month in the Olympic National Park Wilderness Area. I had spent an extrordinary amount of time living in the elements and being able to appreciate nature. My group of 12 had just left the park and were excited to spend a few precious hours at the beach before returning to camp. It was the first time we interacted with the real world for 29 days. Everything seemed strange; from car engines, to seeing people in jeans. As we wandered along the beach we saw smoke coming from a large pile of driftwood. Upon aproaching this, we found that somone had started a fire, left it, and it had slowly been burning rather large chunks of driftwood. It had apparently been going for the better portion of a day. All around this burning pile of driftwood was an ample suply of more driftwood, and a nearby tree line, filled with dead branches and underbrush. Had this fire gone unnoticed, there was a high probability that much of this would have gone ablaze. Once the treeline caught, say goodbye to the Olympics.
To prevent this travesty from occuring, several of us used our cooking pots and bucketed water onto the fire. Unfortunately, it was low tide. The nearest bucketable water was a good hundred yards away. So, needless to say, we did plenty of sloshing buckets all over the beach. By digging a hole halfway down the beach we could cut some of our distance off.
An hour, and several sore muscles later, we finally had the fire down to barely a sizzle. We traded our precious beach time, which we were all looking foreward the entire trip, so that we could put out some fire created by some inconsiderate jerk. Welcome to the civilization, jen...welcome to civilization.