HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
Recently my book group was discussing “What Matters: Economics for a renewed commonwealth” by Wendell Berry. We were all regular readers of Wendell, involved in community agriculture, and concerned about the environment. You could say we were a group of middle aged tree huggers. We didn’t discuss the book itself much. Our concern kept returning to getting the message out.
Wendell and others, have been writing prolifically about these issues for years. Michael Pollan who now is a bit of a media sweetheart (and an industry pariah) constantly refers to his mentors from the past.
I recently picked up “The Sheep Look Up” by John Brunner, who has been called “the Rachel Carson of Science Fiction”. ….. “this book offers a dramatic and prophetic look at the potential consequences of the escalating destruction of Earth. In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment. The water is polluted, and only the poor drink from the tap. The government is ineffectual, and corporate interests scramble to make a profit from water purifiers, gas masks, and organic foods….” (product description from Amazon.com)
The book was published in 1972 
What at it’s first printing was a prophetic look at what could happen if we went hell bent ahead as we had in the first two thirds of the 20th century is now a pretty good description of where we have ended up.
Somewhere in those pages I came across the saying: ” do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, and had an AHA! moment. Now Biblically that saying is: “when giving alms to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, a warning about giving in a way that brings you admiration and to avoid patting yourself on the back for your generosity.
I thought about how in our consumer society we have hidden our refuse from ourselves.
Our toilets flush. We wash dirt from our dishes/clothes/body/homes down the drain, along with the chemical pollutants we use to “clean” them. Our trash goes into clean plastic bags and is hauled away to dump sites that are hidden from view. Our left hand (the soiled hand)(in a society where washing facilities were scarce the left hand was used solely for less sanitary tasks) is busy disposing of all the unwanted refuse the right hand has been procuring.
What if we had to see, every day, the accumulation of trash we create?
Would that open our eyes a little?
When I was a child our trash was disposed of on our own property. Papers, fabric, boxes were burned. Foodstuffs were fed to the animals or used to fertilize the garden. The rest went into the trash heap. This became a bigger problem when we started to purchase food in jars and cans instead of reusing canning jars, or using a dry storage like the root cellar. The pile started to grow quickly. Gradually plastic and aluminum became a problem as they didn’t degrade. Soon we used a trash service which hauled our refuse away to the county dump.
Out of site / out of mind.
I can remember as a kid seeing a news report about garbage barges from NYC taking trash out to the ocean because it had been turned away from a landfill in another state.. I was horrified. Why didn’t NYC take care of its own trash instead of sending it to New Jersey or something? You don’t air your dirty laundry in public and you certainly don’t throw your trash onto the neighbors yard! Now we truck garbage, trash, and other waste products all over the country and the world. Our broken computers are leaking heavy metals and radiation into India. Radioactive Fracking fluids are being hauled to waste water treatment plants hundreds of miles from drilling sites without disclosure of the chemicals they contain.
I’ve got a proposal. I think we should push to have waste products disposed of at the most local government level possible. So if my city/town/county wants to OK an industrial site, or a housing development, it needs to have a plan to dispose of the waste products safely and locally. I would restrict this to nothing larger than the state level.
And NO TRADING!
We’re not going to play the carbon trading game which only allows the richer regions to take advantage of the poorer. Obviously this would take some time. Major metropolitan areas would need time to come to grips. Population shifts would have to take place.
But we need to face the filth we create.
NYC, I would think, would be a special case. In a city where every space up and way down is filled, where the hell do you put it? Nashville had a solution, for a while: huge incinerators downtown that burned so hot they took care of most of the fumes. Traps and scrubbers for the rest. Of course some things really shouldn’t be burned, and that’s a conundrum. The burners burned down a few years ago: another problem.
I would hope there would be a scientific solution combined with recycling. Some bug or compound that turns things into other forms more usable or at least inert. Then you might open another Pandora edifice with what we don’t know about that solution.
The Neo Con vend everything out solution is a non-solution. For non toxics/non bio items like old desks, etc. a local was given a contract for disposing that. We drive by the dump every day. The methane tells us they’re seriously breaking their contract, no one will do anything about it though.
Of course this would never actually happen. Industry would not allow the intrusion into their profits. Elected officials wouldn’t take the heat to get it done. Citizens wouldn’t stand for the costs and the unsightliness, etc.
I think having the conversation and working toward it would be eye opening. NYC might not be so much the exception to the rule that you imagine, just one of the bigger examples.
City dwellers might have a better understanding than many of us, if they are old enough to have lived through a garbage strike. Folks who have lived through a natural disaster like Katrina that devastated neighborhoods have seen the piles of refuse stack up.
Most of the rest of us just complain if we miss trash day, and have to wait an extra week.
Perhaps a good, and doable lesson would be to have once a month trash pick up. Perhaps if we saw the garbage we generate stack up….but then again, it would get trucked off to that garbage lala land that most of us never see.
Of course we don’t have pickup: either place. Here we have a “metro” option, since Millie works there. Beaver River we have to think before we buy, everything has to be disposable. Of course if we had burn laws like they did in Nyack and elsewhere, that would be a bigger problem. I support some of those laws, depending on location and what we can’t burn. Styrofoam? Of course not. Those envelopes tuna comes now? Not so much.
I remember hearing about the garbage strike. Of course since I never lived directly in the city, and may have moved by then: not a direct experience.
There’s so much we don’t pay attention to. Both locations have sewer and well. But most can’t do that. Can you imagine the mess if sewer and water went down? Would we go back to the time when urine, feces were simply dumped out in the street? Where water was sometimes the same stream we dumped in?
Welcome to a Neo Con future! You can have enough money to pay people to haul away or go back to the black plague times.
Your Beaver River experience has you mindful of what garbage you create, and the problems of disposal. We might be surprised to find what is in those tuna packets and why they shouldn’t be burned,
In parts of SC they have transfer stations where you take your trash. They have some recycling available, but many folks still consider that too much of a hassle.
Our toilet systems are problematic because we are using clean water – and lots of it- to flush down waste. A grey water recycling system would be nice. Some older RV’s had them. Now with so many parks completely piped w/running water and sewer hookups you don’t have to be careful of using too much water and draining your holding tank or overflowing your grey water/ or sewage tank.
I have heard of a sink that fits on the back of your toilet so that the hand wash water is used to flush the toilet. I haven’t researched it much yet.
If there’s a problem with the tuna packets, I suspect it would be whatever that foil like substance is, or is impregnated with. I suppose the print might be a problem, but more likely whatever they use to preserve the tuna. I like the toilet idea, of course everything will be on a generator/pump situation until this year, They’re installing an 86 gallon pressure tank. Hopefully that will wash away my run to the lake for water problem when I have guests.
I’ve always thought using fresh water for toilets was a bloody waste. Hopefully any solution for that will be better than the low flush toilets they foisted on us years ago. Until they came up with ways to increase the pressure per flush I called them “flush twice toilets.” Kind of misses the point if it all doesn’t go down. Of course we could go back to outhouses, with less “out,” I suppose. When we moved to Twitchell that’s what we had, only completely “out.” At 40-50 below… fun. Moving them indoors might be problematic health wise I would think. The further we are away from our own waste, especially #2, the better I would think. Less the substance itself, more what grows in it. And to return it into the cycle of life properly we do want those little buggers to grow: just not live in it, or too close.