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Aired on the Doomstead Diner on September 1, 2014

The Fresh Kills (sic) Staten Island Landfill

Park Ave, NYC Trash. No, this was NOT during the strikes of 1975 or 1981. This was shot in 2010

Cockroaches on the streets of Naples, Italy in 2012

Rats at the Buffet Table in NYC

Fishing in Beijing

More Chinese Fishing

Blue Water is soooo Yesterday…

Refreshing the Water Bottle in Shanghai

Biking is Great Aerobic Exercise!

TEPCO sez, “No worries, we will store all the water as Ice Cubes after we Freeze it”

BP sez, “Gulf Shrimp thrive on Corexit”

BC Scientists are BAFFLED by Starfish Melting disease!

Even Crabs get the Blues sometimes…

Snippet:

…Mostly, the trash is put “Out of Site-Out of Mind” in Landfills that are fairly distant from your Suburban bedroom community, so you don’t see them or smell them unless you take your own drive over to the dump to dispose of some of your junk. Mostly we employ public and private Garbagemen for this task, so you don’t see it unless you have one of these jobs. At least we used to call them Garbagemen when I was a kid, now they are called Sanitation Engineers. This sounds sufficiently technical we imagine ourselves to be cleaner I suppose.

Besides the individual waste is the Industrial waste which gets produced along with the products you buy and eventually send to the dump. This includes megatons of slag produced in mining operations and more tons of toxic chemicals. This stuff eventually works its way into the groundwater, which then needs to be “processed” to keep it potable, which takes enormous scale water processing plants in Big Shities which themselves take enormous quantities of energy to run, and after filtering the poisons out of your drinking water, they again need to be disposed of.

So you constantly fight an ever increasing pile of waste, which as the density of the population increases begins to overwhelm any natural processes which might recycle the waste into something which doesn’t pose a health hazard, not just for Hom Sapiens, but most of the other creatures sharing the environment with you…