turn your pockets out toward the future

I spend a lot of my time thinking about garbage, about waste. The waste byproducts of our culture - the partially consumed foods, the superfluous packaging, the disposable consumer goods, the plastic everything - are going to be the most lasting remnant of our civilization. As we speak millions of tons of this archaeological gold is being entombed in landfills across the continent, preserved for millennia in mausoleums that will eventually piled to the max and abandoned to disappear into the landscape as grassy hillsides secretly seething with toxic viscera. That sounds pretty dramatic and well, it is.

I'm no patron saint of trash, I throw stuff away into the garbage bin thats collected weekly and spirited away to its hiding place. But the sad fact is that there is no "away." The stuff that we cast off, even the most seemingly biodegradable stuff, the food waste and paper, doesn't go away. It doesn't break down because it just gets buried where it never gets access to the air or sunlight. And those plucky microbes that do most of the dirty work of decomposition can't survive in the toxic dirt that surrounds our trash. And if your leftover french fries and Jimmy Carter era New York Times are so perfectly mummified, then imagine the time capsule that is the cheap styrofoam cup or the plastic grocery bag.

I mean for most of the folks that might stumble upon this blog, this is not news, but I mention this because of the psychological effect that trash has on me. The ghosts of ziploc bags haunt me. Am I the only one? Is it my Catholic/White/Western guilt? When I was a child, before I had any notion of pollution or environmental degradation, smokestacks made me weep. Somewhat later, after I'd gotten my Captain Planet certificate of indoctrination, passing through Baytown, an oil refining town outside of Houston, on a family vacation was to me a nightmarish vision of the future. Jobs and money and life experience have mellowed me out a little, but even today, landfills make me want to cry like a TV Indian.

I wish I close my mind and go with the ecologically friendly flow a lot of the time, but every damn thing thats supposed to assist in being more kind to the Earth seems to carry with it so much problematic baggage and really is just another form of throwing stuff out of sight and out of mind. My organic baby spinach comes in a corn plastic or bio-plastic container. When I first discovered this I was delighted because I abhor plastic waste most of all and this new stuff, unlike its petroleum based counterpart, would break down into nothingness after time. Only it won't ever do that in a land fill. Its marked with the PLA "7" of death for recycling, meaning "other" which generally translates to un-recyclable as is the case in our fair city. To top it off, the production of corn is like the most wasteful agricultural endeavor ever ("Endeavor Ever" is the name of my new band's new hit single by the way).

I started writing this post because I became enamored of the idea of municipal composting while taking my daily walk break at work. Boulder, CO, a notoriously environmentally conscious city, has recently authorized a new program to pick up food waste and the like in a special container that will skip the landfill in favor of the compost heap. Again, on the face this sounds like an awesome idea, but it too is fraught with its own set of problems from extra costs to the cancellation of other useful services, to bear dangers.

So what the fuck?

Being a green consumer is hard. You really have to watch out and be constantly mindful about not only where shit came from but where its going when you are done with it. Plus this level of mindfulness is pretty much a luxury afforded to me by my economic and social status which is a real bummer, when you think about it. I look forward to a time when all this crap becomes totally effortless and we all look back on this period in our history and let out a sigh of relief that we managed to get over such terrible, wasteful behavior. Oh and all of our food will be in pill form and we will all wear our pockets turned out as will be the fashion of the time.