we are trash

Heather Rogers, from _Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage_: "There's a reason landfills are tucked away, on the edge of town, in otherwise untraveled terrain, camouflaged by hydroseeded, neatly tiered slopes. If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions." (See Alternet.org for more details.)

"If people saw what happend to their waste," to the animals processed for their consumption, to the rivers mined for gold or dammed for energy, to the people who make their clothes and shoes in sweatshops in Central America and Southeast Asia, to the forests that produce our newspapers and envelopes and textbooks and Kleenex...

If people SAW.

(Mirriam Webster -- SEE --
1 c : to detect the presence of; 2 a : to have experience of; 2 b : to learn or find by observation or experience : come to know; 2 c : to find out by investigation; 3 a : to form a mental picture of; 3 b : to perceive the meaning or importance of; 3 c : to be aware of)

How can we possible be aware of something which, as Rogers describes, is systematically obscured from our view? Besides our own garbage cans, and those we see on Trash Day as we drive our suburbans to work, when do we ever really see trash? When do we see caged chickens? When do we see "managed" forests and clearcuts? When do we spend time in the presense of Nature? How many people in the world have an immediate (i.e. unmediated) encounter with a thriving, balanced ecosystem? When do we sit still in the company of Mother Earth? How can we possible SEE if we never, ever stop to look?

Not seeing is a failure of time, a failure of experience, a failure of imagination, fueled by addiction. Addiction to television, to fast food in paper and plastic packages, to identities based on consumption. Not seeing is a failure of Self, a failure of community, a failure of connection. 'Self,' of course, not being some discrete entity distinguishable by its hairdo and outfit and transportation, but rather 'Self' being recognition of one's beautiful and inextricable interdependence with the chickens and the trees and the Nicaraguans and the Mississippi. Recognition that ourSELVES are being destroyed by burying trash in the earth. We are armed, we are fetuses disdainful of the umbilical cord which sustains us, we bite and slash our Mother's body. We destroy her in our belief that we are separate from her; we believe we will climb out of her and survive on carrion.