For those who didn't know, I get into a truck everyday drive around Nashville and haul off ALL sorts of stuff. Remodel debris, rotten moldy furniture, practically brand new appliances, metal pots and pans, yards full of belongings from families just evicted, clothes, kitchens full of food left behind, closets full of forgotten photos, more wood than you can shake a stick at :), pallets, drywall, plastic bottles for days and on and on...
Waste.
That's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of material. That's a lot of waste. And that's just one dude in one truck hauling.
So its a pretty big deal that I recycle, reuse, and repurpose everything that I possibly can! And I definitely do...(feel free to check out our business, Earthtone Reconstruction and Recycling ) yet, the waste is still overwhelming.
Americans are ridiculously good at throwing stuff away. Our culture of consumption drives us to do it. The very material corporations give us are "Designed for the Dump." (check it out!) So when something breaks we toss it... never giving more than two seconds thought as to how we might fix it.
What's worse though is that Nashville particularly is in full on trash everything mode. Every
day so much gets thrown away that is still totally functional... just for the sake of modernizing.
This happens all over, every day, with fairly no thought given about the sort of impact this kind of trashing has on our planet.
Let me tell you guys, tons of this stuff does not break down.
And for those who do "consider" it, and think "Habitat will take this stuff!" ... even places like Habitat for Humanity and Goodwill are overwhelmed and inundated with too much stuff. I've personally pulled up to Habitat with a truck full of sinks etc. to give and they had so much that they wouldn't receive my donation. Tons of clothes from Goodwill never sell and simply end up being shipped overseas to third world countries. (If you haven't seen the documentary The True Cost, watch it! Its on Netflix) So much of our clothing ends up in landfills... which doesn't break down like you might think...
But we don't see this side of things. Once something is hauled off... it magically disappears and we don't have to think about it anymore... right? It no longer affects us... right?
But material is not endless, this sort of "progress" isn't sustainable.
I recently listened to a powerful Podcast from The Liturgists, called Pale Blue Dot, reflecting on the state of our planet and the urgency of humanities need to wake up and work together. (Give it a listen!!!)
From Pale Blue Dot: About 1 million humans are added to the Earth every four and a half days.
To feed all those people we are going to have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in the past 10,000 years combined.
We need 600,000,000 acres every single year for the next 30 years to do this... this is a big problem because we are actually loosing twice that every single year.
Some scientist say humanity only has 60 years of farming left at current world soil degradation rates.
1 Billion humans already walk a mile each day for fresh water. At this rate of humanities' carbon footprint on the biosphere, there will be 4 Billion people who will be short fresh water in 10 years.
We have to learn how to work together, to take care of this world of ours, so that it can keep taking care of us.
We cannot continue to turn a blind eye to what's happening to our planet. We've somehow developed this idea that we are separate beings from the world in which we live. As if there is humanity and then there is the planet that we live on. Yet we are not a people on the planet, we are a people of planet. We are all indigenous.
What would it look like if we all consumed less? If we all pursued every means of re-purposing and reusing that we could? What would it mean if we could all just be happy with the stuff we already own? Wouldn't it be just so counter-cultural to NOT remodel your bathroom?... for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth?
What might it be like if we were all actually OKAY with a little grunge? Could the slight bit of grunginess on our old appliances remind us of the state of our planet and possibly even call us into solidarity with SO MUCH of the world that doesn't even have appliances? Or a toilet? Or a Brita filter? Or a TV?!
Each and every person has to be willing to live-less... so that the world can live-more. To even, dare I say it, be un-trendy. Un-pretty. Un-sheek. What might it mean that our Instagrams aren't that beautiful... at least in the way our culture applauds beauty?
It might seem odd that this very blog is preaching against the very means i'm able to find income. Yet, let it die if the world can live!
It's fairly ironic, but if we all had to deal with our own waste... if there was actually no-where to take it and we had to absorb it ourselves... we might change the way we live.
It's no coincidence that the word Jesus uses for "Hell" is the place where all the Waste goes.
...
In All,
We must understand that the path of Love is synonymous with path of Descent... and that Loving our world is synonymous with Loving our neighbor.
We may spend our entire lives receiving these words of Christ,
"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."
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