39.Garbage.doc

Garbage

For most of the past two and a half million years human beings left their garbage where it fell. Oh, they sometimes tidied up their sleeping and activity areas, but that was about all. This disposal scheme functioned adequately, because hunters and gathers frequently abandoned their campgrounds to follow game or find new stands of plants. Man faced his first garbage crisis when he became a sedentary animal – when, rather than move himself, he chose to move his garbage. The archaeologist Gordon R. Willey has argued, only partly in fun, that Homo sapiens may have been propelled along the path toward civilization by his need for a class at the bottom of the social hierarchy that could be assigned the task of dealing with mounting piles of garbage.

This brings us to an important truth about garbage: There are no ways of dealing with it that haven't been known for many thousands of years. These ways ware essentially four: dumping it, burning it, converting it into something that can be used again, and minimizing the volume of material goods – future garbage – that is produced in the first place ('source reduction', as it is called). Even civilization of any complexity has used all four methods to varying degrees.

From prehistory through the present day dumping has been the means of disposal favored everywhere, including in the cities. The archaeologist C.W. Blegen, who dug into Bronze Age Troy in the 1950s, found that floors had become so littered that periodically a fresh supply of dirt or clay had been brought in to cover up the refuse. Of course, after several layers had been applied, the doors and roofs had to be adjusted upward. Over time the ancient cities of the Middle East rose high above the landscape on massive mounds, called tells. In 1973 a civil engineer with the Department of Commerce, Charles Gunnerson, calculated that the rate of uplift owing to the accumulation of debris in Bronze Age Troy was about 4.7 feet per century. If the idea of a city rising above its garbage at this rate seems extraordinary, it may be worth considering that 'street level' on the island of Manhattan is fully six feet higher today than it was when Peter Minuit lived there.

The Atlantic (AmE)