With apologies to Stanley Kirk Burrell (AKA M.C. Hammer) for phrase appropriation, I’m going to use this opportunity to lecture. As unattractive as that prospect is to you and to me, there’s something I need to get off my chest of which it appears most of us are unaware.

There is no “away” to which something can be thrown.

There, I said it. I’m feeling a bit better, but I should probably elaborate.

You see, personally and societally, we operate in a manner that goes something like this: purchase product, remove packaging, throw packaging “away”, use product, throw waste product “away”. But, as I mentioned above, there is no “away”.

“How’s that?” you ask. I’m so glad you did. It brings to mind an idea I’ve been formulating on how everyone, as a prerequisite for waste pickup, should be required to take a field trip to a sanitary landfill. Sorry to go off on another tangent here, but, isn’t “sanitary landfill” a funny name? It is really a dump with an engineered liner and cap, and special operating procedures. But it is really just a dump; about as unsanitary as anything could be. Anyway, we should all have to take a field trip to the “sanitary” landfill before we qualify for waste pickup. And not just the nice lecture the landfill operator would give us about what a great job they’re doing protecting the environment with their super-clean operation, but a trip around the perimeter, where, without fail, we would encounter the waste that unintentionally blows from the waste cells (the actual engineered area into which dumping occurs) during dumping operations. There is a lot of it, and it is very unattractive. Then, we could check out the leachate collection system. “Leachate” is the rather nice name given to the unspeakable cocktail that is generated when precipitation infiltrates the landfill and percolates through it. Hazardous waste is forbidden from being deposited in our “sanitary” landfills - nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Did you ever throw an old battery, a used fluorescent light bulb, or a spent oil filter in the trash? Don’t worry, the law says it is OK for households to place minor amounts of this type of waste into your trash at the curb. You won’t be sent to jail. But since landfills are almost invariably sited near watersheds, I’d think about it the next time I turn on the kitchen faucet, if you know what I mean. The leachate is (mostly) captured by the collection system in a modern landfill, so it can then go to purgatory for bad waste: an incinerator or other hazardous waste treatment, storage, or disposal facility. OK, it is a fantasy, really; there are no “shoulds” available to us, so this is one more idea which won’t come to pass.

Anyway, back to my initial point: if we are of the world (a notion against which I find it hard to imagine an effective argument), then there can be no away. Put another way, if we trash the world, we trash ourselves.

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I see them sometimes, folks throwing bits of refuse from their car windows. I’m certain the thinking goes: “This is just a small bit of waste, it doesn’t amount to anything, nobody will notice, everything’s OK”. Well, I notice. Have you ever walked, run, or ridden a bike along a well-traveled road? Certainly it is not a pleasant prospect in terms of the interaction with traffic, but it is a bit of a case study in cultural anthropology. You can see the many “nothings” people throw from their windows or discard in parking lots suddenly accumulating into a substantial amount of “something”, namely trash. And you drive by it all the time. I figure that a trash-strewn world is one more “brick in the wall” so to speak, another example of a sick culture doing the best it can to spread the ruinous contagion (the notion that the world was created for us to do with as we please, with no consequences) it carries. We’re able to casually destroy the world because the results of our actions are so diffuse and largely invisible to us (especially if we choose not to pay attention).

Our tribal forbears, by the way, didn’t need landfills. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, there were fewer people. Those individuals in existence practiced what I have illustrated as “littering” above. They discarded their waste at the point of generation by simply throwing it on the ground or they used it constructively in another way (for example, bone “jewelry” and ornamentation). But more importantly, they generated less waste per capita than we do. Their way of life rewarded the prudent use of whatever resources were at hand. Furthermore, the waste they did generate was less toxic and persistent in the environment than that we generate. The crucial difference between their cultures and ours are these: They didn’t (generally speaking) extract renewable resources at a rate faster than said resources could be replenished, and the “waste” they created was only “waste” to them. Most of it was food for something else, and the rest was basically harmless and/or biodegradable (for example, mineral waste, such as from stone tools), at least in the quantities they generated. We, on the other hand, create much waste that is novel in form, has little population of “feeders” eager to consume it, and is not readily biodegradable. A great deal of our present waste isn’t well-suited to be the food of any other creature, hence it becomes “pollution”, and accumulates in the biosphere. [For more on this, check out The Natural Step’s Four System Conditions]. Given enough time, it seems likely that organisms will evolve to dine on our “pollution”, but we don’t know how long that will take, and their evolution might have other consequences with which we literally couldn’t live. In any case, we must seek to emulate our tribal forbears if we are to prosper in the long run, for our lifestyle is unsustainable. At the risk of over-emphasizing the obvious, unsustainable behavior is, well, not sustainable. We can’t go on living this way.

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There is an acronym which describes the revulsion we feel for landfills: NIMBY. It stands, of course, for “Not in my back yard”. Every time there is a proposal to site a new landfill, there is a new twist on this dictum. Nobody ever wants a landfill sited near them, but everybody wants easy access for their trash to get into a landfill. The irony of this is apparently lost on us, because every week, there are our bags at the curb awaiting pickup by the trash guys. In the case of my neighborhood, this means lots of bags at most houses, because my community is one of those regressive backwaters which has failed to provide for curbside recycling. Those of us who want to recycle must make the extra effort to periodically take the recyclable commodities to the drop-off center. The upshot of this is, we’d better get ready for very much more expensive pickup fees, because, as the current landfills run out of capacity, fees for the trash trucks to dump (known as tipping fees) will increase greatly, and, as new landfills are built, they’ll be built far from developed areas to avoid conflicts with residents and developers - consequently, it will cost much more to transport the waste to the landfills. We also must brace ourselves for more illegal dumping, as some individuals will be unwilling to pay these increased costs.

This house of cards waste disposal arrangement exists so that we can continue to “support the economy” by buying ever-more impressive stacks of stuff, which, without fail, leads down the road to more waste generation. There is an empty place in us that calls out for fulfillment through material acquisition. Even though it is not satisfying when we feed it through material acquisition, we keep trying the same old way of feeding it anyway. The “high” we get from another acquisition is fleeting, followed almost immediately by the gnawing need of an addict for another fix. You’d think we’d catch on, but take a look at us sometime; it appears that we’re rather unaware of it.

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My point here is, we don’t really improve our lives by engaging in displays of conspicuous consumption. In fact, we degrade them, figuratively (through our exposure to a trashy, toxic world), and literally (we are of the world, and such exposure makes us less healthy).

We need to find a way to live within our means. Edward Abbey wrote: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. Unending, unchecked economic growth in society, dependent as it is on resource consumption, is analogous to cancer in the body. It is a condition which cannot be sustained. Good sense would seem to dictate that we must live sustainably if succeeding generations are to have a hospitable place to live. One way of evolving a sustainable culture is to emulate one. If over-consumption is neither sustainable nor fulfilling, we must find a way to stop it.

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Oren Lyons, known as the Onondaga Faithkeeper, explains to us how his people think seven generations ahead when pondering actions: “In our way of life, in our government, with every decision we make, we always keep in mind the Seventh Generation to come. It’s our job to see that the people coming ahead, the generations still unborn, have a world no worse than ours - and hopefully better. When we walk upon Mother Earth we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them.”

If our culture can turn things around, it will be through adopting an outlook like this one, which allows a materially modest but fulfilling lifestyle based on reverence for our surroundings, which provide us with everything which sustains us. If however we continue to pursue an unsustainable lifestyle, one of entitlement to all of the world’s resources, we will be rewarded by a world which ceases to provide for us and our future generations. The choice is ours.