It was Rachel Carson who quoted Barry Commoner on the subject of the lack of foresight in modern society, when it comes to dealing with pollution. To quote her 1963 The Pollution of Our Environment Speech:

This lack of foresight is one of the most serious complications, I think. I remember that Barry Commoner pointed out, in a masterful addresses to the Air Pollution Conference in Washington last winter that we seldom if ever evaluate the risks associated with a new technological program before it is put into effect. We wait until the process has become embedded in a vast economic and political commitment, and then is virtually impossible to alter it.

I noted this quote in my February discussion of one-dimensional technological rationality, but I think it's an idea that deserves further discussion and thought. To me at least, we rarely consider technology beyond the store shelf or our lives, and certainly not its whole existance.

Seeing the Roots of Production

Everybody sees the capitalist message in our society, of shiny new goods, but few see through to the creation, disposal and the end life of those goods. We see the new good, and it's initial purchase price, but somehow not beyond or before this point. I guess it's in our eyes, an item only is in it's existential sense when it's directly in front of us, when it exists in our eyes and our hands, but not beyond it.

We don't really understand where our products come from, or what materials go into them. We can't really see that, as modern technology is so complex, we can't trace it's roots, or see what kind of damage it's done to the world that we live in. I could never trace this laptop to it's roots, and I don't know what damage I've done to the environment in it's purchase (although, when I recieved it, it was used, which seems to reduce it's associated moral peril).

Few attach the mines, the oil wells burning off excess natural gas, or the factories belching out toxic chemicals to that end product, in it's shiny shrink wrap at the store of Best Buy. We also fail to see who and how these products are made, and the countless faces working in factories, offices, and other places, that make a seemingly simple product.

The buildings we live in our another example. We see the finished house, and sometimes picture of the construction, but we rarely see the materials that make up the house, much less their orginal manfacture. What we see the outside, the siding, the painted over sheet rock, and everything else designed to make things pretty. We don't see the flimsy plywood used in modern building or the dumpsters full of construction debris, coming from the construction projects. The finished product, covered up from it's harshness and malice is all that is of significant concern to ourselves.

Capitalism may not want us to know such things, as it's a seemingly anti-thesis to it's nature. Remember, capitalism is a 'rational' persuit, it has very specific goals, and means tailered for meeting those goals. Anything outside of the desired end result is all but ignored, it is the afterthought that Barry Commoner talks about. In cases like the aformentioned one, I propose that this should be called 'delusion of the roots' of technology and society, a 'tacit' myth told to make us feel comfort with an uncomforting technological world.

Beyond the Roots: A Product's Life

The next step beyond production is the use of a product. Some products are particularly valuable, as they cost us a significant propotion of our income, or they have a special sentimental value to them. We are generally careful with such products, and as such they have a long lifetime. A longer life is a slowing of the destructive capitalist system of production, but it is not a solution or an end. Those items eventually meet their end, and our disposed of in some fashion. See the below discussion on that. In the meantime, let's consider the bigger issue, the things that are less valuable.

On several occassions in the past, I have taken the opporunity to question the sentimental or commerical value of an item versus the 'environmental-impact' value of an item. The terminology is new, yet this debate is old. My best arguement was why is human life so expensive (it's priceless), while an automobile is disoposable? We constantly cut up cars to save people's lives, but never cut up people to save cars. Just suggesting that notion, would to some, suggest some form of sociopathy. Yet, at least we consider pre-modern (and therefore natural) methods of burrial for human kind and the dumping of cars in the back 40, we find that the human being has far less of an long-term enviromental impact then the car has. This even is true if the car has been burned and burried naturally in the woods, were the forces of nature can work on degrading it back to it's natural state over quite possibly hundreds of years.

It is interesting to question this notion, but we rarely think of products in this notion. Humans valuable, mass production not, is how it goes. We don't go to the store, and look at the plastic wrap, and think it's made of dionosor bones. We don't ask how long will the plastic wrap last if dumped in our backyard, to say nothing about a landfill. You can claim to burn it or the state incinerating, but then you have to wonder about the chemicals beyond oil that are in it, and what you are doing to yourself and the environment around you.

How do you care for cheap (again, as a proportion to income) products, in other words things that are officially 'disposable' or so cheap that they can be considered as such? These products are cheap simply because they required little labor in their manafacture. Our economy values things solely by their value through labor, but not their value as material. This is where the notion of 'environmental-impact" of an item comes back in.

What is the true cost of the iron, used to make the steel that goes into a building? The true cost would not be the labor that we put in, but the cost of what we are doing taking and mining the iron from the earth. All products must have some kind of intrinict value to themselves, before mankind lays it's hands on it. Our economy recogonizes to a certain degree, as demostrated with property costs, but property is often devalued compared to the cost of labor. After all, you don't have to pay oil well, much less do anything with the forest. Plenty of wooded areas exist, without any state, corporate, or individual interveining with them.

It seems rather senseless and self-destructive to create, sell, and purchase cheap products, and to use them as such. When you buy that thing at the dollar store, your essentially paying for something that's going to quickly become trash. When you see something new, you don't think of it as trash or call it that, but that's esentially what it is. And you don't find the notion of cheap stuff, which is quickly trash to be a bit disturbing? I certainly do.

Everything To Trash

Everything becomes trash or waste of some form. Some of it gets recycled, but in the minority of cases. Trash is okay for our society—we put it out the street corner or in the dumpster and it's taken away by the trashman to the seemingly distant (at least in our heads), landfill or incinerator (and then the ash to the landfill). Or maybe it goes up in a black toxic smoke, in a burn barrel, which is seemingly as innocusus as taking a bag of trash out back and touching a match to some paper in it.

The point is, we don't seem to really care. The smoke from the burn barrel is okay to us, or if it's not, the landfill is okay for us. None of it ever motivates us to change our behavior, much less take responsibility. Waste is always somebody else's problem, not our own—or when it is, we dispose of it hap-hazardly by burning it or dumping it in the back 40. It never goes to point of being a fundamental critique of capitalism or our condition as human beings.

Do you ever look around yourself, and critique your surroundings as being future trash? The desk that is next to you right now, do you see it ending up in a landfill as construction debris, or being chopped up and used for firewood? Ever go to the mall, and look at the stores, and think that all of their merchandise if sold or not will end up in a landfill? To say nothing of that bag of groceries that you purchased the other day.

We live in a world of soon to be trash, and trash is simply a grouping of stuff we've decided we've worn out, or dislike, or is old. Or maybe just useless to the current owner. Sometimes we recycle (refurbish or use as input into new material) or reuse (tag sales), but often those things are a rarity. It's more likely for us to toss.

Thinking Trash

We tend to kind of grossly look at trash, we view it with total contempt. It's just a bunch of stinky nasty stuff we want to get rid of. We toss it in trash containers and trash bags, haul them to the curb, or take 'em back to the burn barrel and touch a match in them. But rarely do we consider what we a truly tossing, and what those materials are, before it makes it to the curb, or it becomes an inferno.

We call it muncipal solid waste (MSW), and it's mixature of materials doesn't seem to bother most. The landfill is just an acceptable part of American culture. Our society is made up of cheap materials that make disposal a 'sensible' alternative to repair and recycling. It is never a question of disposal, but a question of replacement of items. People will dump almost anything anywhere they can get away with it, so they can replace it with the new. This is why see the growth of landfills and of on-farm dumps in the woods.

Yet, trash is fundamentally materials, things that maybe worn, used, or otherwise exploited, but in many cases can be processed and recycled or at least reused in some kind of form. It's paper, it's plastic, it's about everything, as I previously noted. In many cases we fail to ignore such a thing, giving trash a seemingly sub-material existance. We see it as a pain and a problem, and not really anything useful. You could call our ignorance of trash as materials as the 'dumpster mentality'.

Conclusions: Think More About Trash

My questioning of the solid waste industry should not end here. It should ask you questions, and make you think what and how you consume. Do you need the products in their shinny shrink-wrap, or can you survive with repairing what you already have? How are you promoting the solid waste industry, as an individual? What is your contribution? Are your actions moral? Can you change?

I do not have the solution to these questions, or a way to fix the production to disposal cycle of industry. Yet, maybe a little change in our behavior and existence as human beings will make our world better. Regardless of what you think of landfills, incinerators, dumps, and burn barrels, overcoming the morally deprevention of late capitalism will improve your life. Maybe these questions I mentioned would be better asked in a less instrumental fashion—one discussing less trash and one more discussing who we are as humans in our world.

I have one final question: Is there life beyond capitalism and consumption? I think so, and we should embrace as much of that world as possible. While the instrumental purpose of capitalism is important, we must force ourselves to think beyond that and try to minimize the damage that capitalism causes to us.