Waste
Management
"My firm was involved in waste. We were
waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. I traveled to the
coastal lowlands of Texas and watched men in moon suits bury drums of
dangerous waste in subterranean salt beds many millions of years old,
dried out remnants of a Mesozoic ocean. It was a religious conviction in
our business that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation.
Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of
reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard.
The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper
connections. Were they thinking about waste? We were waste managers, waste
giants, we processed universal waste. Waste has a solemn aura now, an
aspect of untouchability. White containers of plutonium waste with yellow
caution tags. Handle carefully.
Even the lowest household trash is closely observed. People look at their
garbage differently now, seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a
planetary context."
-Don DeLillo,
Underworld
The
Ecological Footprint
"The ecological footprint -the
average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each
person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing,
energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption-is about one
hectare (2.5 acres) in developing nations but about 9.6 hectare (24 acres)
in the United States.
The footprint for the total human population is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres).
For every persson in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption
with existing technology would require four more planet earths. WE have
driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least 200,
000 years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, and contributed to global
warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere."
E. O. Wilson,
The Future of Life
Fresh
Kills Landfill on Staten Island
"Three thousand acres of
mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded with bulldozers pushing
waves of refuse onto the active face. Barges unloading, sweeper boats
poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew
working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to
control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits
were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material
for toxic content.
It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours
a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the
trash, bucket augurs digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and
crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter."
The wind carried the stink
across the kills.
Don DeLillo Underworld
The
Sorcerer's Apprentice
"Humans have accumulated an
impressive body of knowledge about the environmental crisis, but there is
no escaping the fact that our knowledge is incomplete. 'In effect, we are
playing the sorcerer's apprentice with the planet,' Reeves told me in
Paris, referring to Goethe's poem in which a wizard's assistant borrows
the master's tricks, creates a deadly mess, and ends up fleeing for his
life. 'There are those who point to the uncertainties to argue against
taking action, but this I think, is a dangerous approach,' Reeves added.
'If you smell smoke, you don't wait until your house is on fire to look
for the reason.'"
-Mark
Hertsgaard, Earth Odyssey
The
Corporate Cosmology
"The corporation is supposed to take us outside of ourselves. We
design these these organized bodies to respond to the marketplace, face
foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip,
rumor, promotions, personalities, it's only natural, isn't it-all the
human lapses that take up space i the company soul. But the world
persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around
you, the caress of linked grids that gave you a sense of order and
command. It's there in the warbling banks of phones, in the fax machines
and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer. Bemoan
technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in
your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise
unperceived."
Don DeLillo,
Underworld
Elixirs
of Death
"For the first time in the
history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with
dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In less
than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so
thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that
they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the
major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen in
the earth.
Residues of these chemicals linger in the soil to which they may have been
applied a dozen years ago. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of
fish, birds, reptiles and domestic and wild animals so universally that
scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to
find subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish
in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in the soil, in the eggs
of birds-and in man himself. "
-Rachel
Carson, Silent Spring
The
Triumph of Death
"Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on
store shelves , yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will
that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean,
neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a
tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed. First we saw garbage,
then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo. How
does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it is responsible
to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live for
a million years.
Don DeLillo,
Underworld
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