Since Earth Week just passed, I thought I would talk a little about some of my pet peeves. To be green and ecologically friendly to the planet, we must change the way we do things, and this involves changing the way we see or visualize them. For some reason very few garbage dumps are open to the public so most people don’t really get to see what a mess they are. In Yellowknife we are very lucky in that we can go to the dump and have a look around.
We are still in the “out of sight, out of mind” way of thinking. Bury it and it somehow magically disappears from people’s minds. When I was a kid in boy scouts, the motto was burn, bash and bury. When you went camping you were supposed to burn all your garbage in your campfire, bash all the cans and bottles with the back of your axe and then dig a hole in the ground to bury them.
The trouble was, if you went to a well-used camping spot and tried to dig a hole within walking distance of your camp site, chances are you would dig up someone else’s buried garbage. So, the motto got changed to “if you take it in, bring it all back out”. It saved the camp sites, but you were then putting garbage into the municipal garbage system, and it ended up in their dump. As cities started to run out of places locally to bury garbage, they started trucking it hundreds and even thousands of miles to colossal size landfills. Some places like Yellowknife started building hills and small mountains out of their garbage.
It’s only a matter of time before the politicians start building cities on top of old garbage dumps, because all the available land is taken up with other things. Here in Yellowknife, the best view of the city can be seen from the top of our dump. We are also running out of land to build on. So why not save Tin Can Hill and build the newly planned university campus on top of our current dump. It has a great view and if they collected the methane they could heat the university, its buildings, and dormitories.
In fact, they could salvage enough building materials from the dump to build the place. So, it would be a win, win, win situation and we would have found a use for our dump. To me it is a no brainer that we must stop burying garbage in the ground or worse yet throwing it into the world’s oceans. If a bunch of kids in boy scouts could figure it out decades ago why can’t the politicians.
People also must realize that the planet has one atmosphere which we all share. It is a very thin layer of breathable air. When you see a jet plane up in the sky with its contrail, it is well above the level of breathable air. The death zone starts at a mere 8,000 metres. People who travel into space usually comment on how thin the earth’s atmosphere really is and if we pollute the atmosphere with noxious gases, then the entire world’s population is at risk. So we really need to rethink how we are using and abusing our atmosphere.
Here is something else to consider the next time you go to a lake and are tempted to throw a stone, a bottle, or a can into the water, which is something many folks like to do. Think about this: if everyone on the planet visited the lake and threw in a stone, bottle or can, that would be over eight billion stones, bottles, and cans. Do it for a few days and you will fill the lake. Now if someone walked up to you as you were about to throw your stone, bottle or can and politely suggested you not do it, you would probably be offended. You would even be angry. That is human nature it seems.
It is difficult to stop humans from doing certain things but everything we do has a consequence for the environment and the planet. We have to stop hiding problems, see them more clearly and act accordingly. That’s what earth week is all about.