About International flytipping - fouling our nest
Let's publish and circulate pictures -, with analysis and reflection -of flytipping in beautiful places - sometimes opportunistic, sometimes official. By 'beautiful' I don't only mean blighting a rural landscape but also a city shopping street, a bus or the sky above us with smog that fills the lungs or light that obscures the constellations..
Flytipping is sometimes ignorance, sometimes laziness, sometimes greed, but is often part of market conditions and political attitudes as these affect the disposal of waste material in a consuming world. Let's learn more about causes.
Flytipping is the illegal dumping of waste, varying in scale from one plastic bottle in the Mississippi, dog excrement on a sidewalk in Brighton, a piece of used chewing gum stuck where you sit, walk or put your hand on a bus in Melbourne, through discarded plastic bags of household trash up a cul-de-sac in Birmingham, to massive quantities of industrial detritus dumped from trucks across continents, poisononous waste flowing through the oceans pole to pole, to the growing debris orbiting the earth (to see the range, tour the images in the Group).
Fly-tipped waste includes almost everything you can imagine. Some would view it as an archaeologist's delight - but our midden (the incredible amount of rubbish we humans produce) is engulfing us often beyond the capacities and will of government policies to address the problem - with smog and light we spill ourselves out into the delicate membrane around the earth that supports all life here.
Tyres and all imaginable remains of cars and trucks, white goods, mattresses, window frames, plastic bottles, hi-tech materials such as in the icon of the group, powders, liquids - some toxic - in containers, and clinical waste. You name it. You photograph it. You post it - and discuss it to! Doesn't the smog around the brillant architecture of the 'bird's nest' stadium in mighty Beijing symbolise - not just for China - the way we are 'fouling our own nest'?
Who does it? Why do they do it? Where do they do it? Where to does this stuff go - into the ground, into the water table, into land-fill, into the oceans, into space. What can be done about it. How can we learn to live more lightly on the earth, re-using, recycling, perhaps never using in the first place. Manufacturers are beginning at the point of manufacture to ask how something they make can re-enter the economy or the environment as something benign and even useful. Government's and corporations are beginning to place prices, sometimes taxes, on things sold that will include the cost of their sustainable disposal.
Seeing the pictures posted and the comments that accompany them, I'm already learning from administering this group. The images tell a story that can go beyond words but I value the comments that complement the photographs - whether these simply locate the flytipping in time and space or whether they add explanation and conjecture about why flytipping happens and what we can do (and some are doing) about this global habit of wastefulness.
I am always hopeful. This is not about the earth which has merely to do the equivalent of a shrug and in a few million years - nothing in geological time - humans will have become no more than a radioactive stratum laced with particles of plastic. It is about us as a species. Can we stop fouling our nest?
The subject has raised more questions. Look up and see the criss-cross of contrails scratching the blue - as though a giant were trying to claw his way into our delicate ecosphere. I'm approving images of 'skytipping' in the group.
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