Talkin' Trash
Why do we live the way we do?
Lately I’ve become quite conscious of the consequences every time I finish a product and take its empty shell to the recycle/trash bin. Especially that I am only one of multiple billions of people doing this on a daily basis, and in my mind I multiply that product carcass by a billion and try to imagine the immensity of the heap that is created.
My imagination is helped by remembering the garbage mountain along I-275 in Michigan that I used to drive past on the way to Detroit’s airport. And it pales in size compared to those near the mega-cities of the world. There’s a Mt. Everest of garbage being built outside of New Delhi, India, population of 16 million, that rises higher than the Taj Mahal – more than 75 meters – due to the more than 2,000 tons that are added each day. Then there’s the ginormous heap at the Bantar Gebang landfill outside Jakarta, Indonesia. Reflecting back to us the nature of our modern times, this mountain of “trash” is not only refuse, but the source of livelihood for some 20,000 unfortunates, earning $2-$10 per day, sifting through the stinking mass for something of value.
igure 1 The Bantar Gebang landfill in Indonesia. Look at the many people searching through the trash.
Every metropolitan area has one or more of these, what is, and has become, the final legacy of modern life – because all of the consumer goods that are produced, bought and used, find their way there, sooner or later.
Of course modern man is well aware of this and efforts are made to recycle packaging materials to reduce landfill impact. Millions of people dutifully fill their blue bins with plastic and aluminum to be recycled, but despite our efforts a mere 10% of plastic is actually recycled, and aluminum beverage cans do better reaching almost half.[1] So despite our efforts landfills are destined to keep growing.
Why do we live like this? And who created this way of living?
Most likely few people give much consideration to those questions. It is what it is, and we simply have to deal with it. Or if anyone does ponder such questions they are likely dismissed as being the accidental result of innumerable decisions made by millions of different people made through the course of history. Perhaps that’s a comforting thought, then there is nobody to blame – it’s “just the way things are.”
Comforting perhaps, but wrong.
In fact there were people, and many of them, who long ago, very deliberately determined that we should all live in cities and be forced to deal with the consequences.
Who Will Tend the Machines?
Mechanical genius exploded in the 18th and 19th centuries and machines were invented to do almost everything that was formerly done by hand, or with animal power. This allowed for increasing the scale of operations beyond cottage industry, substantially increasing output and profits. The next problem was finding people to run those machines, and that was a big problem, because the vast majority lived on the land and were satisfied doing so. Why would peasant subsistence farmers, who could happily maintain themselves in rural village life without extreme endeavor be motivated to take up an onerous and monotonous job tending a noisy machine, working long hours in a dirty, hot, or cold, sometimes dusty and otherwise rank factory atmosphere? If a person could live a life of independence on the land, even if meager, why would they choose to become dependent on the mercy of others in the city? They wouldn’t, and didn’t. I trace out the forced transition from village to city life in my book “"Lessons in Spiritual Economics from the Bhagavad-gita”:
From the 16th century and continuing into the 20th century, land has been confiscated by state authorities, forcing people into a dependent lifestyle. In England from the 16th through 19th centuries a series of “enclosure laws” were enacted to eliminate the use of village lands and the commons. Of course the commoners resisted the loss of their prerogatives with petitions, threats, foot dragging, the theft of new landmarks and surveys, covert thefts and even arson. By law, the commoners had previously been entitled to the produce of the soil. Their cattle also had a right to the grass.9 The soil itself, the land, was not owned by the commoners, but the use of it was. That use, what the law called profit a prendre, was a common right that ensured the survival of peasants whose social relations were structured by access to land, common agriculture and shared use-rights, and they did not want to surrender any of these rights. This contest of wills was decided by force over the course of three centuries, as 19th century social revolutionary and commentator Peter Kropotkin explains:
‘In France, the village communities began to be deprived of their independence, and their lands began to be plundered, as early as the sixteenth century. . . What took place in France took place everywhere in Western and Middle Europe. Even the chief dates of the great assaults upon the peasant lands are the same. In Germany, Austria and Belgium the village community was destroyed by the State. . . The communal lands continued to be preyed upon, and the peasants were driven from the land. But it was especially since the middle of the eighteenth century that, in England as everywhere else, it became part of a systematic policy to simply weed out all traces of communal ownership...The very object of the Enclosure Acts, as shown by Mr. Seebohm, was to remove this system, and it was so well removed by the nearly four thousand Acts passed between 1760 and 1844 that only faint traces of it remain now. The land of the village communities was taken by the lords, and the appropriation was sanctioned by Parliament in each separate case.
In short, to speak of the natural death of the village communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield. The fact was simply this: The village communities had lived for over a thousand years; and where and when the peasants were not ruined by wars and exactions they steadily improved their methods of culture. But as the value of land was increasing, in consequence of the growth of industries, and the nobility had acquired, under the State organization, a power which it never had had under the feudal system, it took possession of the best parts of the communal lands, and did its best to destroy the communal institutions.’[2]
The push to drive people off of the land also took place in the United States. It was the policy of the Department of Agriculture to eliminate small farms, and from the 1930s to the 1980s more than 5 million small farms were eliminated. That’s more than and into the cities has continued to the present day. That’s more than 8,000 farms eliminated every month, for 50 years. In the 1930s 50% of the American population lived on farms. Today it is 3%. [3]
And to this very day it is the desire of the world’s elite to. A 2015 report from the World Economic Forum lamented that it will take another 25 years for 50% of the population of India to become urbanized.[4]
Apparently, among this crowd, trash creation and disposal is not a problem to be solved, as they clearly desire that we continue producing and stacking more of it.
Rest assured, there is a better way to live.