I was at the grocery store the other day and thought it would be nice to get a couple of tomatoes. My options were tomatoes from France, Mexico and Canada. But not from Florida, even though they are in season. I contemplated the “vine-ripe” grocery store tomatoes, but they were too hard to end up in a salad that night. So, I made a detour to a family farm stand and got what I needed and wanted.

Tomorrow is trash day. Like the rest of my neighbors, I will put the household garbage out by the curb first thing in the morning. Sometime between late morning and early afternoon a truck will rumble by and whoosh – all my trash will go away. But in my heart of hearts, I know it will not go away. There is no “away”. That trash is going to travel about 10 miles east and get buried. I have had enough family die to know the meaning of ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I also know enough science and pathology to understand that those words do not truly apply to my trash.

Every product we use, be it a ball point pen, a Teddy Bear, or a sandwich, has 3 life stories. First is the story we do not think about. The second is the story we relegate and delegate, and the third life story is the one we do not care about. Three life stories that are so much out of sight and out of mind that we are neither conscious of nor curious about their existence much less our role in shaping the lifeways of the commodities we need or want or desire. And therein lies the rub.

The first life is the creation story – how does the product come to exist and become available to us? What is the timeline of its genesis? How far has it traveled and how many stops were there along the way? And depending upon the product’s simplicity or its complexity, how were its components sourced, what additional ingredients went into the mix, and what by-products were discarded along the way?

The second life is the one of our use and interaction with the product. Are we truly cognizant of what has been created for us? Are we willing to be responsible for the results of the product’s use and existence? Is the collective, cumulative, and continuous generation of the product providing us the results we were hoping for? And are the results in agreement with our values?

The third life is, of course, the future denied. We are humans living in a technologically enhanced and augmented world yet completely and totally reliant on natural resources. Our currently preferred financial model promotes a linear economy which means we make trash. A lot of trash. According to the World Bank, we generate over 2 billion tons of municipal solid waste per year and are forecast to up that amount to 3.4 billion tons by 2050 ⁽¹⁾.

Too often our curiosity about a product is about three questions deep – Is it in stock? How much does it cost? Do you have it in my size, or preferred design? We will ask about storage capacity and megapixels when we buy a smart phone, but not about its recyclability or the use of child labor in any stage of the phone’s production. And with the tomato, we won’t ask why it takes 2.5 gallons of water to grow each one, or who grew it, or how they were treated, or what chemicals were used to grow it (that might be a risk to them or us). And we will totally ignore how a tomato grown in another part of the world can be refrigerated and shipped thousands of miles and still be sold for a profit at competitive local prices. What are all the issues that must be ignored, or overlooked, or discounted to make that economic system work? And who does that system actually work for?

Why do we accept the concept of trash? Why do we accept the idea that the best way to fix something is to replace it? Do we truly believe that those particular atoms and molecules only existed to create a product for our temporary use before they could be taken out of service for the rest of eternity?

When did we collectively decide that asking questions or being skeptical were bad things? When did we collectively decide that we had no intergenerational responsibility to the future?

When did we collectively decide that creating a world of scarcity was the best and brightest thing we could do?

When did we collectively decide that the habits of the past were the guideposts to the future?

And why would we decide those things when this is such an amazing planet to live on? No other planet that we know of has butterflies and wildflowers. No other planet has a beach where you can listen to waves roll in. No other planet has trees you can climb or animals that sing. No other planet has the ability to heal and adapt like this one does.

Yes, humanity has been giving the planet a rough time of late – and the planet has returned the favor. Most of our issues have come from being too acquiescent to the belief that “that’s just the way things are.” We have been so busy looking for answers that we overlooked the need to get the question right.

What are we really trying to accomplish? I like fairness. Is it fair to all concerned? Questions expand conversations. The past is history. We cannot change it. We should not ignore it. We should not hide it, but there are many parts of it we should learn from and not repeat.

But the real issue is how are we going to enable the future? For that, we need to let our curiosity and our skepticism be our guides.

Tim Rumage

• “Kaza, Silpa;Yao, Lisa C.; Bhada-Tata, Perinaz; Van Woerden, Frank.  What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050. Urban Development. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30317 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”