The patient and hard-working president of Haines Friends of Recycling recently summarized that illegal trash dumping in the Chilkat Valley cannot be curtailed due to the “lack of enforcement.” While technically true, Melissa Aronson’s remark in the CVN skirted a key point of public interest. The routine method by which a community can retrieve 99.999% of municipal trash is through the proactive legislative rubric known as mandatory collection, meaning every home, apartment and business — which is a form of enforcement.
Fact: Successive Haines Borough assemblies and mayors have not prioritized keeping trash out of fish and wildlife habitat and burn barrels. Despite the well-known harms, and fiscal/legislative remedies, the borough has simply avoided managing waste comprehensively. SWAMP-II talked it to death again, disabusing committee members. Accomplishments? Not much.
Humankind seems addicted to convenience and hell-bent on more, and no matter the cost it’s getting worse, not better. Instead of filling a jug at the tap, or the spring, we buy a “convenient” 24-pack of bottled water — to discard or recycle; either way, worse than stupid, because the costs are known. Toxicity is the posterity we leave to the future, the unrecovered and growing debt of “convenience” and retail waste. The generous toxicity we gift to our children — in air, oceans, rivers and livers —reflects a full-blown planetary failure. Capitalism run amok and governments are indeed culpable.
Burl Sheldon