From the vault — various dates (revised):
Ever since we hairless apes swung down from the trees and began walking upright, we have tossed our garbage aside wherever it was convenient (and healthy) to do so. As the ages passed and our numbers increased, we tossed aside even greater amounts of garbage. When we became “civilized” and organized ourselves into collectives, i.e. cities/towns and nation-states, our garbage piled up prodigiously and we were forced to hire “specialists” to haul the stuff away and dispose of it in some place out of sight (and smell!).
Prior to the industrial Age, our garbage was mostly biodegradable, i.e. it decomposed and nurtured the soil. Such items as animal parts and objects manufactured from natural materials which had outlived their usefulness were discarded hither and yon or buried. Then humankind learned to transform natural materials into unnatural items; these were either non-biodegradable or required long periods of time to decompose. Nevertheless, they were discarded when their usefulness ended and piled up in heaps out of sight (and smell!). Landfills multiplied like mushrooms.
Now, in the 21st Century (o.r.), we hairless apes are in danger of being buried in our own waste. Sadly, we have even used our waterways as dumping grounds.
Even more destructive to the environment than littering is the extraction of natural resources on a massive scale. Whether we are talking about trees, minerals, or water, the impact upon our various ecological systems is enormous, and particularly when we waste so much of those resources for non-essential purposes.
Chief among the non-essentials is the manufacture of plastic items. The reasoning is that it is cheaper to extract oil from the ground and turn it into plastic than to use natural materials; hence, everything that can be manufactured is manufactured with plastic. Plastic takes a long time to biodegrade (if at all); and therefore, it is the largest source of garbage.
It wasn’t always so. Our less “sophisticated” forebears took only what they needed to survive and no more. With the advent of capitalism, industrialization, and unchecked population growth, the dynamics changed radically. Humankind took more than it could use and threw away the surplus. This mode of destruction continues at an ever-rapid pace. Many “solutions” have been proposed to deal with the problem, but they have been implemented only on a piece-meal basis. A more comprehensive plan is needed.
The Coddington Agenda recommends the following:
- Enact a nation-wide beverage-container deposit of 20 cents on all containers (water, milk, beer, wine, liquor, sodas, energy drinks, etc.) as an incentive not to throw them away.
- Require manufacturers of beverage containers to take back their containers for re-use (where feasible).
- Ban the manufacture, sale, and distribution of all Styrofoam products, litter which cannot be recycled.
- Allow “mining” in landfills in order to recycle/re-use/repair as much trash as possible.
- Encourage the composting of food scraps to be used as fertilizer.
- Organize work brigades from among the ranks of the unemployed to pick up trash and garbage in assigned areas and pay them the Federal minimum wage for their labor (this would be one aspect of a newly-revived Public Works Administration).
- Prohibit all extractive activities on public lands/waterways.
- Cease building dams and remove existing ones.
- Expand the acreage of existing national parks, forests, monuments, refuges, and wilderness areas and create new ones to forestall destructive development.
- Give the Environment Protection Agency more authority to pursue #’s 7-10.
Just a thought.