It has always amazed me that I can be way out in the middle of a huge space of wilderness, sometimes days beyond any access to other people, and I can be walking along within this middle of endlessness and suddenly happen upon... garbage.
How the heck does a beer can get out into the middle of the Tongass Forest wilderness area along a beach that took me ten days of paddling and five hours of hiking to get to?
The anthropology of waste might have some insights into this phenomenon of mysterious can sightings and address some issues of how we might become more critically aware of our own ways of existing within spaces of waste - and then again, it can serve to open up a whole can of worms of potentials of thought. That beer can is like the tip of an iceberg of a much larger issue - of how we discard so many things, and taken to an even broader level, how we are even living within a phenomenon of discarding, to some extent, almost everything around us.
A friend who recently arrived in the US from India looked around at people o the street and remarked, "If these people were to discard everything that had been created with child labor, they would be walking around naked."
I heard a friend recently say, "We're living in a time of throw away goods, throw away children and even throw away countries."
One little can. Landfills. Unfulfilled - or even unformed - dreams of children. Child labor. Wasteful actions. The effects of wasteful actions. How do we effect some sense of perspective.
One friend has a blog of "sightings" - reports of unusual creatures being washed up on beaches, appearing in surface waters or being found or caught far from their historical ranges. My vision of waketrail is to create a global space for sightings - not only of creatures, but also of projects, and possibly of garbage sightings or projects for cleaning up garbage, or sightings of water or electricity waste or food waste. Each of these has a specific location. Why not begin to build a consolidated awareness of these?
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