First outdoor holiday of the year, filling Washington Square Park, my back yard, with garbage

April 20th is the cannabis holiday and Washington Square Park attracts people celebrating it. I have no problem with people growing a psychoactive plant and smoking it. I think it’s legal anyway. But trashing our shared environment becoming standard for every occasion is tragic. I could cry.

Plastic doesn’t break down on human time scales. Unlike, say, fruit peels that become plants later, the doof wrappers everyone dumps make their way to our blood streams, killing wildlife along the way. Paying for it funds kicking people (and wildlife) off their land, Cancer Alley, Sacrifice Zones, and more.

I saw not one piece of fruit or vegetable. Everything people shoved down their maws caused suffering of poorer people. These pictures show an imperialist culture. How can they not see the suffering they’re funding?

I took pictures mostly of trash in garbage cans, but there was plenty on the ground, taking pictures of which would have created identifiable pictures of people, which I didn’t want to do. Even the stuff in cans will make its way to oceans, even if delayed with time in a landfill. It funds more extraction, burning, etc.

This garbage is a fraction of what I expect after the Pride March in June. I’ve contacted the organizers, who were on my podcast, but they haven’t responded with much interest. You can bet they’ll bend over backward to include every group they can that’s there, but not the people that their garbage contributes to killing.