Unnatural Nature

WASTE
The world around us is filled with charred remnants and scattered filth in too many
forms; too diffuse, of every size and shape and smell, ugly and unwieldy, born of
every age and temperament. It seeps into every crevice, floats down every grimechoked
street, pools and piles and decays in every corner of every home and city and
patch of Wilderness. And there is always so much more of it than we can ever hope
to study. A beachcomber of the 1990’s might have stumbled upon The Nikes of
Queets, washed ashore after the Great Shoe Spill, when entire shipping containers
filled with high-priced shoes spilled into the sea before their cargo slowly made its
way to the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. Recent hikers of Mt. Everest will find
piles of earlier explorers accumulated trash that they are now obligated to bring
down with them upon their return, alongside their own equipment and their noble
fatigue. There is no human-made object so well traveled, so ambient, as waste. It fills
the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical age
across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every seas
floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world. It’s in the air, in the
water, in yard sales brimming with kitsch, in houses stuffed to the rafters with rubbish,
in outer space, spreading out in invisible clouds of toxic chemicals, and piling
up in immense mountains of garbage stacked in trash-bricks below ground at Fresh
Kills or Puente Hills or a thousand other dump sites. The soil itself is part of a new
geology, as the beaches have been remade into plastiglomerate, their sands mingled
with the pulverized microplastics of our petroleum age. The genes of sea creatures
that ingest these incredibly small fragments of our trash are mutating. Geologists
have now begun to study “technofossils” and the sedimented debris-layers of our
vast compressed cities, so immense and consequential that they now constitute part
of the geological and planetary record. With our waste We have reordered space and
place, reshaping them in its image the world over. But many of us are fortunate or
foolish enough to tend not to feel the world in this way most of the time. In places,
the air still seems breathable, trees manage to seem vibrant and green, squirrels
appear happy and filled with energy. Even so, if one of humankind’s desires has
been to put its stamp on the world, waste is the most compelling and universal way
in which it has accomplished its mission. Every landscape is a trashscape. This not
only transforms the world into one vast and unevenly distributed trash heap; it
changes, in ways that might not even be perceptible to us, our sense of self and
humanity in the world. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, we have colonized
it all with our waste and the elaborate processes that produced it, creating human
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