Garbage Update: April 1st. Weather today: Rain and Snow. I'm looking forward to removing a pile of wet slushy garbage after work. Nothing like good timing. I took some pictures of our pile. It's actually not nearly as bad as I thought it would be but I'm obviously glad to get rid of it. I took a few things from this.
1st: Everything is trash. Everything we buy is wasted. There are no exceptions. This is the natural form of consumption. Even a "Homemade" meal comes in its basic ingredients from eventual waste and is itself in the end wasted to the river with no return to the soil. Nothing cycles back to the beginning.
Our system of agriculture, by modeling itself on economics rather than biology, thus removes food from the cycle of its production and puts it into a finit, linear process that in effect destroys it by transforming it into waste. That is, it transforms food into fuel, a form of energy that is usable only once, and in doing so it ransforms the body into a consumptive machine. - Wendell Berry, The Body and The Earth
2nd: This waste is systemic. Everything moves from it in an inescapable line. Even if I recycle I'm still existing outside the natural cycle of nature and merely delaying the inevitable. Recycling is better than not but is still a product of the system; not that recycling in this city is at all useful, accesible, or convenient. I'll try and do it but I'll do it without hope.
3rd: None of the things I use are a complete good to me from beginning to end. My use of them is finite and short. I do not get use from their birth or their death or much of in between. By example, I'd think a tree would provide shade in its life, wood for furniture in its death, nutrients for the soil or heat from a stove in its disposal. This is not the case. It doesn't serve its full purpose nor will it.
5th: Garbage is ugly and stinky.
6th: Compost, Reduce, Recyle, Reuse. These are our four means of trash removal and will be our four means of reducing this pile in the future.
Threw all the garbage out last night. Filled two full two house dumpsters. Final Count.
34 bags.
8 boxes
250 sq feet of carpet
15 nailed infested boards
1 hot water heater.
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