UTOPIA'S APPEAL

A quick look around will readily convince all but the feeble-minded that a new Garden of Eden for the human species and all others on Planet Earth is not on the horizon. Studying the true state of Planet Earth reveals the simple fact that we are already living in our own waste bin. When China refuses recycling from The West, as it has recently, it is clear that we are all waist-deep in our own refuse with no easy answer in sight. If you doubt me, troll around YouTube, and you will be educated.

Nearly twenty years ago, it was discovered that the high heavy-metal content in the fertilizer manufactured by the advanced sewage treatment centers in Europe and North America had poisoned millions of acres of arable land. Put simply, that land will not be usable to safely grow food in any foreseeable future. The plumbing industry has been scrambling to replace copper and iron pipe in human urban infrastructure. Unfortunately, the only alternative at this time is petrochemical pipe, which comes with its own complications.

Meanwhile, developing nations have been experiencing a population explosion. The continent of Africa has overcome the population moderation caused by the HIV epidemic. Islamic nations are promoting overpopulation as a conversion tactic by which they will eventually rule the Earth as Allah has, in their minds, deemed proper. East Asian countries with the possible future exception of Japan are also becoming more and more overpopulated. South America, still under the sway of Catholic indoctrination in combination with lack of modern public education, is producing an ever-growing underclass.

How much trash and waste do humans produce per day? This year the World Bank estimated that 3.5 million tons of trash and solid waste are produced by human beings every day. That's 1,278,000,000,000 tons of trash per year. Why don't we notice? Well, for one thing, Earth's mass is a bit over 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. So, even sending all those recyclables to the developing world doesn't shift Earth's orbit, but there will eventually be an end point. There is only so much land, air and water. 

Not being confronted with knee-deep trash daily is a problem in itself. Developed nations have sanitized urban environments to the extent that the smell of urine or the sight of human feces on a city street is perceived as an obnoxious anomaly. The West is urbanizing its populations more and more. This has the bad consequence that landfills and trash incineration are unperceived by those of us generating Earth's greatest amount of non-recyclable waste. 

A recent conversation brought this home to me in a big way. Our condo complex currently has a trash pick up weekly at the curb in front of it. The city collects a pile of trash bags every week as it has done for 30 years. Single unit homes in the city now have regulation trash bins which are emptied by a mechanical trash truck arm. The city has requested that citizens who do not have the regulation bins for whatever reason use special orange bags which are purchased locally from retailers. This enables the trash collectors to recognize that trash and then to manually place it in the trucks that collect the trash mechanically from the bins. The orange bags are stamped with the city seal. The bags cost about $2 each and hold 30 gallons of trash. The money goes to the city to defray its waste management costs. I support the program and use the orange bags. All my weekly non-recyclable trash fits in one bag. My one orange bag now gets picked up by the regular collection truck. The rest sit at the curb, attracting flies and litter from passers-by, until the special pickup truck comes to collect later in the day. 

I suggested to two owners of the 12 units in my complex that we all start using orange bags, thus eliminating the extra manual pick up of undesignated trash bags by the city. This would lower the city's cost modestly and we could be seen as aware of the city's increasing need to manage waste effectively with its growing population. My suggestion was greeted with horror and protest. One owner said, "But that doesn't do anything for me!" That owner then said she would storm city hall if it required her to use the orange bags. Another owner implied that I was unnecessarily rocking a steady boat. "The city has always just taken our various trash bags. Why change?" I left the conversation with a familiar sense of having walked into a brick wall with the best of intentions to make progress. 

There it is. These same owners would be outraged if our street became inundated in trash and garbage. But who could they turn to if the city government had no further way of coping with all the trash and garbage? The answer is obvious: Nobody. 

Those most invested in the current wave of Leftist politics seem to best represent human beings who are spoiled and unwilling to accept personal responsibility for the state of the planet. This is the paradox of collectivist thinking. Once all communal needs are transferred to public authority under a purely socialist system, individuals become either complacent or perpetually disappointed in the inefficiencies of government due to the inevitable corruption which follows. Government housing projects are great examples of collectivist failures. And they have been since their inception. 

Yet there are those who cling to the Utopian ideal that it would be so easy to take care of everyone equally if just everyone buckled under the specific Utopian brand being sold at any given time. This transcends the political Left-Right spectrum. Remember that the Garden of Eden was a place of no toil and endless bounty before Adam and Eve ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. No politician could sell typical political b.s. in that situation. 

Could the fable of Eden be referring to our animal nature before we evolved into the frontal-lobe-driven creatures we have become through evolution? Certainly Tarzan, Jane and their other primate friends would agree. But that was then and this is now, as the saying goes. The Old Utopia has been lost to us for hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps the New Utopia, as Yuval Noah Harrari has speculated, will be constructed by a post-human species. The paradox of existence would unfold yet again with machine-human hybrids making Nature work for all the remaining natural species on Earth. For me, that New Utopia has little appeal. I have spent my adult life coming to grips with life without Utopia. Frankly, learning to accept it for what it is in a deep and meditative way has brought me peace.