Member-only story
The Mythology of Garbage
We will not conquer the problem of waste until we conquer the problem of believing that objects are disposable.
Every Sunday night, you plunge your hands into the filthy receptacle, haul the nylon bag from its rank depths, toss it over your shoulder, and reluctantly haul it outside to deposit the last week’s refuse into your government-issued trash receptacle. You roll the blue bin to the edge of your driveway, scrunching up your nose to try not to smell it, and then deposit it, faithfully, marching back inside your house without a second thought.
We have an implicit faith in our city government, in some kind of quasi-spiritual system, to faithfully come and collect our garbage, and then… I don’t know, who cares what happens, they make it go away.
The topic of garbage- or, as it is warmly referred to, trash- has been hijacked and repurposed as a spiritual lesson, a political weapon, a topic of urban-planning inquiry, a blight of scientific progress, but rarely as an object of philosophy or art. Trash is, almost universally in public discourse, remarked upon as a problem to be solved. “It is ruining the environment,” cry the environmentalists. “It is an expensive burden,” bemoan the economists. “It is a cesspool of disease,” caution the physicians. “It is a tragedy of our…
