Waste is unveiling. As we find ourselves standing in garbage that we know is our own, we find also that it is garbage we have chosen to make, and having chosen to make it could choose not to make it. Because waste is unveiling, we remove it. We place it where it is out of sight. We either find uninhabited areas where waste can be disposed of, or fill them with our refuse until they become uninhabitable. Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society’s own habitation into a wasteland.
[…]Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be. It is a consequence of this contradiction that the more waste a society produces, the more unveiling that waste is, and thus the more vigorously must a society deny that it produces any waste at all; the more it must dispose, or hide,or ignore, its detritus.
– James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
