On Trash…

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This week, a half-dozen famous women took a trip into space, an opportunity previously reserved for educated and trained astronauts on purposeful missions to collect data potentially beneficial to human kind. But this wasn’t that serious. Unless I am missing something, these women got this chance because of their fame and/or excessive wealth, and was just for the fun of it.

According to the founder of the facilitating space tech company, Blue Origin, the sole purpose of the flight was to bring attention to women in aeronautics. The obvious question is “why not send actual female astronauts?” The eleven minutes, start to stop, that it took to make the trip didn’t allow for much more than the experience of weightlessness and exclamations of “look at that!” and the burning of a great deal of methane. It was the selfie opportunity of a life time. To top it off, these silly women stepped off the rocket and kissed the ground as if this voluntary trip was made under duress and not a choice made exclusively for their own amusement. The entire thing seemed rather wasteful and self-serving to me.

But, here is my point and how I turn this around to a soap box moment.

During a Tuesday morning discussion, a member of our group wondered how much debris is left out there in orbit from these fun flights in space. In my opinion, any debris is too much for these little joy rides, but the facts indicate there is around 7,000 tons of debris floating between a 100 and 1200 miles above the Earth.

How we humans deal with our trash has always been problematic. We have been mucking up our planet since the invention of the first straw in 3,000 B.C.; now we are expanding out into our solar system. Depending on whether you think the world is millions of years old or just a few thousand, I think we’ve had ample time to figure out garbage. I mean, we can put a man on the moon, after all.

We use the term ‘throw it away” as if “away” is an actual place where trash just disappears, never to be seen again.

In ancient times, early civilizations buried or burned their unwanted stuff. The ancient Greeks were meticulous about keeping their city clean, there were laws prohibiting trash on their streets, so they dumped it outside their city limits with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind philosophy. People that lived near water simply tossed their trash in the river to go “away” downstream. Barge loads of trash were dumped in our seemingly endless oceans, supposedly disappearing into the abyss. But, back then, trash was biodegradable and non-toxic. There were no plastic bottles. Household items and cookware were made from bone, clay, rock or wood and unwanted metal items were melted down to make new items.

But now our trash is different. Our oceans are not so endless, after all. Plastic and other unnatural materials thrown “away” today, will out live me and you. Unfortunately, our trash seems to have evolved faster than some people.

My family and I spend one weekend a quarter cleaning up the mile we live on. We aren’t the only people who live on this mile, but we have taken on the task of cleaning it up for everyone. The last weekend in March, we collected roughly 15 bags of fast food containers, beer cans, diapers, and a pile of things that could not be bagged like old tires, construction material and pieces of broken furniture. What people can justify throwing out of their cars astounds me. Do we need to bring back the crying Native American commercials? It reminds me of an old routine by the comedian Steve Martin, where he says “Always have a litter bag in your car. This will keep the inside of your car tidy, and when it is full you can just toss the whole thing out the window.” That was a joke, but it seems to have become a life philosophy for some folks.

A few days after our mile cleanup, someone who I have to assume walks upright and has opposable thumbs, stopped 50 feet from my driveway and unloaded mattresses, an old chair, and other items. It was like a slap in the face. The cleanest mile in the area, and this Greek wannabe decided my home was the “away” where he would leave his trash.

In our rural community, we have “big junk day,” where once a month our waste service will pick up practically anything, at no extra charge, and take it to the landfill. Thus, there is no reason for anyone in our town to dump trash anywhere. Could they not wait a few weeks for the next “big junk day?” Did they bring it from a community where there is no such service? Did they see my family’s willingness to clean up the mile as a sign that we wanted trash here? I don’t know the answers to these questions. People, as a species, confuse me no end.

I often hear the phrase, “people do the best they know to do.” I’ve come to doubt that. I believe some people do the best they know to do, but I don’t think everyone does. Someone old enough to drive a car thinks dumping their crap in someone’s neighborhood is the best they can do? I feel that Yale psychology professor, Ellen Langer, is more accurate with her opinion that “people do what makes sense to them, otherwise they would not do it.”

To the person for whom dumping this load of crap near my driveway made more sense than, say, taking it to the designated landfill or calling 1-800-Got-Junk: Do you realize there is no such thing as “away?” Just because you no longer see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t here. I see it. You made your problem my problem. That makes sense to you? Your trash is not my treasure. Your trash is simply trash, and your dumping it on me is trashy.

There are tons of debris orbiting Earth, thanks to human space travel and satellite technology. We have islands of trash floating in our oceans because that is the best idea for disposal the less than inventive people in charge could come up with. Our rivers are clogged by the results of human apathy. My family picks up an unbelievable amount of cast aside items from our roadside four times a year.

So here is my question…

What is WRONG with you people?