Google constantly impresses me. It keeps getting easier to verify wild claims that someone throws at me. So tonight I looked a few things up and, by golly it is not hard to imagine man being capable of messing up the earth.
Let's take it up close and personal.
First we take all the land area in the world, then divide it by the human population; we each get about 6 acres.
Your personal 6 acres is about 1 and a half city blocks. Less than 1/4 of that is suitable for farming. The rest is largely mountain and dessert and frozen tundra.
It is real easy to see how I can affect that much land in my lifetime.
According to Winona Duke, each American's direct and indirect contribution to solid waste is one million pounds per year and 5 million pounds of contaminated water every year.
That sounds impressive, but I am not seeing support for her million pounds per year. The best number I can find is closer to 1500 pounds per year of landfill waste, plus about 40,000 more pounds of CO2, and about 3 million pounds of water.
Ahhh, but that is only on American soil. Add in the stuff we buy from other countries because we prefer that they do the dirty work and create pollution over there. Then add in transporting that stuff around the world. Winona's numbers are pretty close after all.
So...
Imagine if you dump all your 6 million pounds of waste on your own 6 acres.
Without careful management and reuse, you end up living in a smelly garbage infested pig sty.
As long as we buy into our consumer lifestyle, this is what we are doing, but it is mostly in someone else's back yard.
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2 comments:
pigs wouldn't live there
I've raised pigs and I find them to be clean animals. The problem is that we enclose them in small pens and prevent them from living naturally. "Pig sty", in my opinion, is an example of our consumer lifestyle polluting not only our world but our language and our perception.
You've written about the heart of the problem. We're isolated from the consequences of our decisions and actions. We don't see the pollution and harm.
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