New York City has to be one of the busiest places on earth and while there is a brilliance to that, it is also a fantastic problem. When you are working a 60 hour week, have to take a crowded 6 train to work and have to spend such an amazingly high percent of your time avoiding walking into someone or getting hit by a cab, considering “ your trash is going would seem pretty low on your list of priorities. All you know is you throw it out and it goes somewhere. The public’s detachment is just a product of modern life; division of labor pretty clearly states that a Wall Street investor shouldn’t be bringing his own trash to a dump, but a greater degree of self-awareness within NYC’s residents is important.
We of course need to look to San Francisco, for their zero waste program is exactly where we need to be going in the future. In the present though, an ad campaign, like the one Daniel Choi and myself created or Joe and Jackie’s ads, simply raising awareness is crucial. Change will be hard if only a small group of honors students and some true believers are behind the cause, real change would come with the masses. The truth is we simply cannot consume at the level we do now, and if the public can accept that maybe we can actually save ourselves from a destroyed environment.
Treece, is a destroyed environment. To even consider that someplace can be that thoroughly wrecked by man, not even for war but for business, is severely depressing. It may a grim thought but I have to wonder how many more “Treece’s” will come to exist in my lifetime. Fracking seems more than capable of destroying large sections of our country and yet no one looks to the mistakes like Treece that have already been made. I can at least perhaps find some solace in that if I continue to live in New York maybe I can stay blissfully ignorant to these horrible events, realistically though I doubt I will be able to.
I don’t want to condemn the earth by any means but I’m getting more and more sold on the idea of firing garbage into space. In my lifetime a space elevator could be possible and if so maybe we can actually do away with some of the damage we have already done. The idea of real change being made just seems pretty unlikely. Then again if San Francisco successfully created a no waste system, I can’t imagine New York isn’t capable of it. The issue is immensely complicated and the stories of Treece and Tullytown are horrifying, I only pray a true, viable solution can be found before the entire world looks a little too much like Treece.
From this class I can honestly say I have become much more conscious of my recycling and waste habits and try to be responsible with my garbage whenever possible. Although it is nearly impossible in our society to truly avoid creating waste, I try to minimize it as best I can and now often get confused looks at stores when I say I don’t need a bag and just throw it in my backpack. Simply everything you buy comes with huge amounts of packaging, which is often pretty difficult to repurpose or reuse. Hopefully our society will draw back its overuse of resources, but if not I really hope we can figure out how to shoot trash or some other space age solution because with our current patterns the whole earth will just be one great big dump in a hundred years or so.
