Junk, Garbage, Shit and Poison

Junk, Garbage, Shit and Poison

Plastic roams the oceans. Two islands of mostly plastic waste—toothbrushes, condoms, styrofoam, baby bottles, Elvis statues, shopping bags, toys, CD-cases, credit cards, cheese wrappings, whatever—whirl just below the ocean surface in the Pacific Ocean. Each island is about the size of France. There’s one in the Southern Atlantic as well. Several places contain plastic rivers. Here’s one in Indonesia posted by @djoko_kirmanto on pinterest.com.

City streets, parks, highways and forests throughout the world display discarded plastic in many forms. In a flatten view of the world in a time-lapse perspective we could witness plastic waste spreading like mold on a slice of bread. That’s not including all the plastic buried in landfills or the tons that transform into air pollution after being incinerated. Nor does it include the micro particles of plastic residing in all of our bodies and the bodies of all animals.

Plastic is but one element in the mountains of excrement System Humanity shits into the environment daily, everything from from diarrhea-like sludge and sewerage to constipation-like lead-paint coated metal. All of it accompanied by the farts of gases, some hissing and stinking from industrial chimneys, some silent and deadly from human endeavors everywhere. Homo sapiens could more aptly be called Homo contaminatiens. We, the subjects of a money-oriented system of society, pollute the air, contaminate the water, deplete the oceans, exhaust the soil, heat the atmosphere, cause havoc among all forms of life and threaten our own existence. It would be difficult to defend ourselves against accusations of being a filthy species.

But who could make the accusations or offer a defense? The most damaging junk, garbage, shit and poison cannot be detected in the air, water or soil because they occupy our minds. We could not be ravaging nature and torturing the conditions of life were it not for a ravaged, tortured, contaminated and polluted soul. Until we clean it out and start treating each other as humans with common interests oriented toward creating a peaceful, healthy, just and vibrant community for everyone, with an unshakable respect for life and oriented toward building and maintaining a garden of beauty and love of the earth in harmony with nature we will not – rightfully so – survive.

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“Nature is the mother of life.
It ticks to a greater clock than the cycle of days.
In time, it repays all insults.”
Dartwill Aquila

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West Bank is now the Judea-Samaria area.