Our throwaway society

Being British in know that I'm supposed to be stereotypically reserved and say things like "musn't grumble", "keep a stiff upper lip old chap" and such. However I think you'll agree that ten years in the USA and a significant amount of blogging therapy is certainly helping me to rant up a storm when the occasion demands. But I can only aspire to the invective generated by Mark Morford over at SFGate. His latest column is a diatribe about our throwaway society and its predilection to develop product after product that will be used once and head straight for a landfill.

Its unfortunate that Morford never mentions the most notorious of throwaway products that our society produces: munitions. A bullet, shell, missile or bomb is lovingly fabricated by the industrial military complex, shipped to foreign shores, fired once and then forgotten. After that it is a useless piece of metal, lead, chemicals or radiation deposited in our environment. The perfect throwaway product - you don't even need to cart it to the landfill because the landfill is wherever it lands.

The problem with anything throwaway is that it takes energy, labour and time to create something. Then that something is promptly thrown away and almost always much more of those resources that went to make it are wasted than if the product were reusable in some way. It values consumer convenience over the natural resources of the planet, largely because we overvalue our short-term view of life on this planet, over the long term sustainability of life on this planet.

Such a perspective is a natural consequence of people increasingly disengaging from society as a whole and viewing themselves or perhaps their family's needs as the single most important thing in the world. This is all possible because in our modern western view of things, society and the earths resources are simply taken for granted. The hundreds of billions of people years and billions of earth years taken to create them have conveniently been swept under the carpet.