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Health & Fitness

The Conservation Conversation: Cleaning Up The Mess We've Made, Part 1

People have always made more waste than any other animal of comparable size; and lots of the wastes we make these days are unlike anything seen in nature.

From time immemorial, a fundamental issue confronting human society has been how to get rid of our wastes.  For the most part, we've done a pretty bad job of it.  This series of five blog posts will explore how we got into the mess we're in, and how we're now trying to get out of it.

From the time our first hominid ancestors tamed fire, and increasingly over the 10,000 to 12,000 years since we started growing food and domesticating animals, the amount of waste each individual human makes has exceeded that made by any other animal of comparable size.  And what we have done with those wastes has been to throw them away. 

Archaeologists are delighted that ancient societies often threw their wastes onto piles or into pits near their habitations.  Ashes from cooking fires, food wastes, flakes from flint knapping and the making of arrowheads, shards from broken ceramics, broken totems and even toys, all found their way into these ad hoc landfills. They have proven to be an important window through which scientists try to catch a glimpse of how our ancestors lived.  

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Of course, like every other animal we humans produce bodily wastes, which have also had to be dealt with by every society throughout time.  Inappropriate management of human sewage has been a major vector for the spread of diseases over the ten or twelve millennia since people started to gather in larger communities.  Ancient Rome was distinguished among cities of its time by, among other things, its use of underground conduits to carry away sewage. The wastewater didn’t go very far, though – it simply emptied into the Tiber River with little thought about those living downstream.

Another long-standing human tradition has been the urge to fill up wetlands.  We now know them to be among the most productive ecosystems on earth (along with coral reefs and tropical rainforests), but in the past wetlands were often dismissed as “swamps,” breeding grounds for insects that served no useful purpose.  Throughout the world, wetlands near agricultural communities have been drained to expand farmland, while wetlands near towns and cities have been filled with wastes and then converted to what people considered to be better uses.  Large parts of London were swamps in Celtic times.  Similarly, most of Manhattan's shoreline, fringed with wetlands when Henry Hudson first saw the island, is today dry land extending hundreds of feet further out into the harbor.   All three New York area airports, as well as the 1939 and 1964-65 World's Fairs, were built on filled wetlands.  Here in Douglaston, the Doug-Bay development was built on wetlands in the 1960s.

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Still, for most of human history the amount of waste each person created and discarded was relatively small, and was primarily organic and “natural” in origin – think sewage, food and agricultural wastes, wood ash, etc.  Durable construction materials such as quarried stone and fired brick, and metals like copper and iron for implements, were difficult to extract and work, and so they were used and reused and reused yet again.

But this rapidly began to change with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.  In the 18th century coal replaced wood, peat and dung as a primary source of energy, and in the 19th and 20th centuries oil and gas augmented or replaced coal.  The amount of energy available to human societies increased exponentially over the past 300 years, allowing the creation of the disposable consumer society prevalent today in most of the developed world.  In consequence, the amount of waste generated by each person – directly and indirectly – has also increased exponentially.  The average American generates 4.5 pounds of garbage each day, and this doesn’t count the wastes generated by the industries that support our lifestyle, from automobiles to electronics to processed foods.

Next time: how the nature of the wastes we generate has changed dramatically in the past two centuries.

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