Our Limitless Bounty

My wife just returned from the store with a wealth of food; meats, cheese, bags & boxes full of things to fill our cabinets with. So much food & more stored in pantries & freezers we could survive for months. I help stow away the items & start preparing dinner. I chop; onions, lettuce, tomatoes, making salad while she cooks pork steaks. Peels from the onion, bad parts of lettuce, fat from the steaks all find their way into the garbage. Then wrappers, bags, paper towels, may other things follow them along, into the waste.

The basket is full, almost bulging over, so I pull the bag, & put it into a bigger bag with trash from other rooms, old newspapers, bottles, jugs, wrappers, magazines, countless item fill the large bag in no time. This is one day from my one little house. This is happening all over the world. Everything we discard filling up holes to later hold shopping malls & urban development. Endless resources going away, never to be used again. Oh sure, we make pathetic little attempts at recycling: a few cans her & there or some newspapers but it doesn’t matter. None of this little insignificant stuff we do matters. It very well could be too late to turn back this stupor that we live in.

We have gone for so long with our illusion that the resources that sustain us will simply last forever. My god I’m typing this on a laptop while my TV is on & no one is watching it. Every light in the house is on, even in rooms with no in them. I am as big a part of the problem as anyone in this country. Truth is, everything in that big black bag I just sat out on the curb could (& should) be put to use. We really should not be throwing anything away at all. It’s going to happen! We are going to run out of food/fuel/materials everything. And yet we go on squandering the bounty of our earth. Living like there is no tomorrow. At this rate there won’t be