Waste Not
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Long ago, I came across an idea attributed to Gandhi that there was no such thing as waste only misplaced matter. Whether it was his or not, it is an excellent view of life. A view completely foreign to modernity, where waste is equated with wealth. Today’s lifestyles of the rich and famous flaunt magnitudes of conspicuous excess, of waste, unmatched in any previous historical era – call it progress.
The Baffler has a well worth reading review (NC) of a new book titled W-A-S-T-E Not. It is a history of waste and how it has been dealt with, or not, by a variety of civilizations, including Roman sewer systems or the infamous London fog brought about by burning coal for industrialization. Most ironic about the latter, coal is literally the geological debris of hundreds of millions of years old eco-systems. The randomly buried and fossilized remains of once living organisms exhumed, burned, and brought back to a kind of transient life as energy turning the wheels of industry and more recently opening and closing the transistor gates of compute technologies.
If you travel the less industrial world, the debris of industrialism is openly piled high in the cities or spread thick along roadways. I remember as a kid in the US, to deal with such abundant public trash, an education campaign against littering was conducted. It was enormously successful. Amusingly, you might ask in this day and age, who could conceive of a successful public education campaign on any issue? With great unintended irony, the campaign was symbolized by a tear rolling down the face of a first American. The tagline at the end should have read, “Make litter sparse as us.”
With industrialization waste became exponentially greater than ever in human history. Producing ever greater waste became equated with greater wealth. With such an unprecedented increase the burning, dispersal, and burial, the moving and hiding of trash, became essential. Unfortunately, in the long run, if we look at the earth as a whole system, most especially in regards to its sublime variety of ecological systems, this notion of trash is a losing game. Yet, the noxious idea of waste is so ubiquitous it spills over into all sorts of thinking. Most amusing is the plentiful writing describing oxygen as a “waste product” of photosynthesis, waste that both created and sustains you and me.
Changing the dominant contemporary ethos of waste, the valuing waste as wealth, requires adopting the catholic values of ecological systems where there is no such thing as waste, everything is reused. Dead plants become the decomposed matter of new life, as does animal feces, eventually even the animal itself. In regards to inorganic matter, the stuff of industrialization and information tech, such as steel, computer chips, and screens, it requires the implementation for every product and process of the old environmental adage “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” – in that order. Rejecting in total, the simplistic notion that a perpetual churning of ever greater product is equivalent to ever greater wealth. Waste is not wealth, it is waste.
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