miles of moving garbage

Our backyard butts up to a fairly heavily-traveled train track. Last night, eating dinner on the deck, we watched a long train pass, car after car filled to the top with garbage. Plastic bags, a traffic barrel, a couch, metal, all trundling by on its way to somewhere. Piles and piles and piles of it. We've never noticed garbage being carried by the trains before. Where the hell does our garbage go, that it has to be put on a train to trundle off into the distance?

There's something fundamentally insane about fighting a war in the Middle East and paying $4 a gallon to regimes that sponsor terrorism, not to mention the extensive social, health, political, and environmental damage wrought by extraction of other resources like coal, metals, and water, all so we can enrich a country hostile to democracy and throw things out at an increasing rate, negating their potential to reduce the virgin resource stream and not just cancelling out every shred of their embodied energy, but actually increasing our energy consumption so we can continue to acquire things to replace the very similar things we just threw out.

Every shred we throw away presents a lost opportunity. Until we stop seeing the items and garbage around us as an end result, and start seeing it as part of a circle, an economic chain of events which can yield value over and over and over, we will trundle mindlessly toward our doom.