As always with posts showing litter and garbage, I’m posting about the beauty of nature and our ability to restore a culture that doesn’t reward behaviors that require that nature needs protection, conservation, or restoration. Even if I post about garbage, pollution, and depletion that hurt people (and other life), my point is about the underlying beauty in nature and the liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, national security, and unity we are capable of.
A couple weeks ago I posted How our society treats a building’s garden, which showed how our society casually treats people’s gardens as places to dump garbage. It’s important to note that I’m illustrating a system, not people’s individual behavior, though each of us is responsible for our own actions. I specify the system because if you pay for single use plastic, you’re funding the system as much as someone who bought slave-produced cotton in 1850 funded that system. You may say you don’t put your plastic in someone else’s property, but the person buying slave-produced cotton probably didn’t want slaves whipped, but that’s how the system works.
My point is to empower and show what you can achieve. I’m not talking about values or judging, just showing how systems work. If you don’t have a problem with funding the trashing of our world, I’m not saying you should. I’m only showing that you’re contributing to it.
Although I’m posting a couple weeks after my last post on the subject, I took these pictures a day or two after that post. It’s that normal. I don’t see garbage there every day, but plenty.
I guess someone likes a shot of rum with their garbage doof beverage. There’s more plastic and packaging than non-water substance.
In blind taste tests, people prefer New York City water to nearly all other waters. It’s safe and free. People buy bottled water at something like $2 a bottle and leave the plastic where they feel like.
Two restaurants nearby are already turning on their heating lamps, heating the outdoors, or what I call Funding Putin and Iran. It’s October. Enjoy fall weather, not self-indulgence.
Actually, it’s not even indulgence since no one is sitting under most of the lamps. It’s just funding the extraction of fossil fuels and uranium, violating the Constitution, even if not enforced.
Here’s a bar heating nothing.
The pictures above were my building or across the street. The one below was elsewhere in Manhattan, but look at what they’re doing. Halloween is a fun kids holiday. People decorate pumpkins and put them out for people to enjoy.
In today’s world, instead of displaying pumpkins, which does seem like a waste of food, they are displaying painted garbage.
What happened to us?
We’re celebrating garbage.
Has our idea of fun become to paint garbage and show it off?
Is garbage not enough?
In case you can’t tell what’s in the picture below, the garden on the left is the garden from the pictures above and the post two weeks ago, but looking from the other direction. The bright white light below and between the two red traffic lights is a doof vending truck that set up on the corner outside my building. If you look carefully, you can see the two guys running it to the left, sitting on the plants in the garden. Needless to say, sitting on the plants kills them.
The truck had a generator burning kerosene or whatever they burn, funding Putin, creating its noise, stink, and air pollution, combining with the stink of whatever low quality meat they were grilling. Noise pollution is pollution.
Can you imagine walking out of your home and seeing a vendor set up out of the blue? Would you like to experience it?
I asked the two guys if they would like their truck in front of their homes. Actually, first I asked a couple questions that they answered fine. When I asked if they would want this truck in front of their own homes, they stopped being able to speak English.
Do I have to point out that if anyone buys from this truck, it’s not people who live in this neighborhood. It’s people from outside the neighborhood who come here and fund polluting this neighborhood, especially noise pollution.
I just returned from Arches National Park, and we only found one piece of garbage the entire week (well, maybe two). The first was a scrunchie that obviously fell off of someone’s hair. So we picked it up. The second was a flashlight that someone must have dropped in the parking lot. I found it as I was walking through (in the dark). It has a new home. It was very refreshing to not see any trash. I stayed at a campground and happily refilled my water bottle from the tap – which was basically a spigot just above the ground.
Garbage fills our streets, with single-use plastics leading the waste stream.
https://tracknyctrash.com/
https://www.newyorkriverwatch.org/seneca-meadows-and-the-communities-paying-the-price-for-new-yorks-garbage/
Thanks for the links.
I can’t wait for people to work on decreasing the creation of the packaging in the first place, or really the act of bringing fossil fuels into the biosphere.
Hi Joshua, and thank you for inspiring us!
It’s pathetic that billionaires in the waste industry are paid with our tax $$$ to pollute the hell out of communities in Seneca, NY, Newark NJ, PA, VA, etc with our megatons of garbage, and we don’t have huge protests against DSNY’s partnership with them and covert failures to reduce waste; the “compost” food waste reduction program is a failure at 10% participation on a good day full of yard waste!
I hope you are already familiar with Beyond Plastics and the amazing and difficult work in the NY legislature.
We’d love to have you join this effort!
https://www.beyondplastics.org/nys-packaging-reduction
Judith Enck has been a guest on the podcast.
Back in the dark ages, I was in the military and worked on nuclear stuff. We were tasked with “cradle to grave” responsibility. It wasn’t enough to create the nuclear reactors- we had to know ahead of time what would happen to the spent fuel and contamination.
I have often wondered why this is not a requirement for all packaging.
All the money people spend on fossil fuels for flying, driving, yoga pants, and so on funds a lot of political campaigns, resulting in a lot of political favors. Extraction industries rank among the most corrupt, leading to regulatory capture.
Actually, a bigger issue is that there is no “grave” for fossil fuels once brought into the biosphere, at least not on any relevant human time scale. That is, it remains in the biosphere, harming people, for millennia. Nobody finds solutions because they don’t exist. Well, one big one does: not to bring fossil fuels or uranium from outside the biosphere into it. There are a lot of middle steps, but anything else violates the Constitution. My upcoming book fills in the middle steps. It also shows why we think enforcing the Constitution in this way is impossible or would make our lives worse when the result would be the opposite.
Stay tuned for more.