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There is a wise old adage, "That if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it." The reasoning behind this adage is that your fix may do more harm than good.

Before I get into the city's latest folly or illogical plan for the dump, I thought I would tell a couple stories about an infamous character who lived in the North in the 1970s and 1980s to illustrate the point. This character, we'll call him Joe, was quite willing to work but as many people pointed out, he was the type of person who was a danger to himself, in part because he failed to think through the consequences of his actions.

One morning at the Dismal Lake exploration camp, the foreman asked Joe to paint the roofs on some plywood buildings. That night the foreman came in late for dinner and after the meal was over and everyone was sitting around relaxing he asked, "Where is Joe?" No one seemed to know, so they walked down to the building Joe was supposed to be painting and there he was sitting on the peak. He had painted himself into a corner there and was sitting waiting for the paint to dry, so he could get back to the ladder and get down. Apparently he had been sitting in that spot since mid-morning.

One summer, Joe got a job to sit in a remote forestry tower and if he saw any forest fires he was supposed to report them in on a short wave radio. During the summer they didn't hear from him for several days and they tried to call him on the radio with no luck. So eventually they sent out a helicopter to check on him. When the helicopter arrived Joe walked towards it with a cardboard box full of radio parts. It turns out that his radio had been working fine but he got bored so he took it apart to see how it worked and he just couldn't get it back together again.

The moral of these tales is that you have to think through the consequences of your actions and if it ain't broke don't try to fix it because you just might make things worse.

Well, the city has thought up a new idea for the dump. They want to create a "salvage-only area" and a "garbage-only area." They expect people to sort through their stuff and put it in the appropriate area. Then they won't allow any people to salvage stuff in the garbage only area. The problem with this idea is that a lot of people are going to end up throwing salvageable goods into the garbage-only area and so there will be less stuff to salvage and less salvaging will take place at the dump.

Right now, there are people who salvage a lot of scrap metal and beverage containers from the garbage pile and under the new system that will stop. So on the one hand you have the territorial government trying to encourage salvaging and recycling and on the other, you will have the city limiting it. Also, from my personal experiences and from those of other salvagers, often people throw away what they think of as garbage but it is stuff that actually contains a lot of really good things to salvage. A person pulls in, throws out a bunch of plastic garbage bags and you ask them, "Is there anything in there worth salvaging?" They answer, "Naw, it's all garbage." After they leave you go through the bags and find toys, Lego, books, clothes, dishes and no end of good stuff.

So the city's new policy, in my mind, is just another Machiavellian attempt to limit and eventually eliminate salvaging at the dump. As the forestry boss shaking his head said to Joe, "If it was working fine, why did you take it apart?"

- Walt Humphries is a well-known Yellowknife artist and prospector