garbage

i want to live in a world in which people do not create garbage
can i achieve this?
is this desire of any value?
are there any reasonable steps i can take in response to this desire?

people need to discard things.
i'm not saying they don't. don't accuse me of that.
to be quite precise
which turns out not to be so difficult
i want to live in a world in which people don't create giant heaps of garbage
which they then leave somewhere and conveniently forget about
(where do we leave them? on an indian reservation. in china
or bangladesh. on top of some poor fish's reef.)

i want to make it clear that i am not talking about recycling.
it certainly appears to be true that some things can be recycled very effectively,
and in the case of those things recycling appears to be a great blessing
a wonderful thing
but in other cases we are told that the solution to our garbage problem
is to recycle this or that thing
into something revolting.
these latter kinds of schemes are scams.
for one thing, why would we want to surround ourselves with revolting things.
it may solve a problem in a certain sense, but it cannot be called a good solution.
and, for another thing
when we're done with our penance
and have used that revolting thing for a time
it's usually a thing which cannot be recycled.
it goes in the garbage.
i want to live in a world in which we do not produce garbage in that sense
of heaps of it which we leave in some convenient place where it won't bother us
never mind that it will bother someone else
(never mind, even, that we are only pretending it doesn't bother us)
not in a world in which we pretend not to produce garbage in that sense
while, in fact, to put it simply, we do.

how can we achieve this is the question.
it's the question i am asking. some will say the question is should we even try.
i am asking how it can be done.
i use the word we because it seems doing it would require
some kind of collective action.
as much as i would like to do it myself, on behalf of everyone
so as not to bother others with the pesky problem
i don't think (to engage in some mild sarcasm) that's a reasonable notion.

the problem with garbage is that it's harmful. it's hurtful.
it may not be harmful, hurtful, or offensive to us directly
it may be - it is - a great blessing to us
to be able to conveniently dump our garbage somewhere
where it doesn't bother us
but it is harmful, hurtful, and offensive.
so the answer to the question
as to how we can do it
is either to stop creating garbage in any sense
or it is to turn our garbage into something that is not harmful, hurtful, or offensive.
and, as i've already noted
i don't think we can stop creating garbage
garbage is a product of life
inevitably
that's what i think.
so the answer is
how can we turn our garbage into something benign?

i would note, here, that it might help if the garbage we do produce
were more rather than less benign.
in my opinion there are definitely steps we could take
to produce more benign garbage.
the question which follows from that is
... i've forgotten what it was.
(i am able to take certain steps in this direction myself
as it is
but i admit they are not so easy
and i can think of steps i might be able to take to
in effect make it more of a collective effort
and by that means make it easier for me
to create more benign garbage - as a starting place -
while such steps, if successfully taken
would presumably, and by definition, encourage others
to also produce more benign garbage
writing as i am here being, in fact, one such step
in fact, seemingly the most practical such step
even though, though i can do the writing
i don't feel the utmost confidence it will produce a result
of the sort intended ... but my lack of a feeling of confidence
might be a separate issue)

it's quite a question whether it is conceivable that we could
make our society into one which produces no offensive garbage.
to begin with, quite a large number of people
would say the suggestion is offensive
that it is upon them, or, as they might say
an insult to society
which, whether i mean it to be so or not, it in fact in a sense is.
so one question is whether that kind of opinion can be overcome.
in that sense, of course, the question is political.
i am inclined to avoid, if possible, taking a political approach
and the way to do that, and still pursue my goal, seems to be
to say that ... well, to explore ways to produce no garbage
without insisting that society in fact do so
(asserting, thus, that producing no garbage is something we can do
even though the semantics of it define it as not doing something)

also, producing less offensive garbage, which i'm proposing as a step
towards producing no garbage, still produces garbage. thus the discipline
of producing no garbage has two steps: first, producing less offensive
garbage, and then turning that garbage into something that is not garbage
at all.
to put this in more definitive terms, what i am proposing is that the way
to produce no garbage at all is not to cease producing garbage
because, as i have said, producing garbage is part of life
and i am not proposing ending life in the pursuit of an end to garbage),
but rather, to produce no garbage is a two step process:
first, we produce garbage, and then we turn that garbage into
something that is not garbage.
it could also be argued that it follow from this that producing
less offensive garbage - perhaps indeed inoffensive garbage - within
the context of the essential first step, producing garbage,
is an irrelevant concern, as long as we can complete the second step,
turning garbage into something that is not garbage. is still think, though
that producing inoffensive garbage, in step 1, might be an essential step.
i could put it in less absolute terms, and call it probably a helpful step,
but it might in fact be essential to a complete result, an assertion
i would defend as follows: it is the offensive, harmful qualities of garbage which
make it problematic. if, as a matter of abstract logic, we produce offensive
harmful garbage in step 1, regardless of whether we ever complete step 2,
we have not completely solved the problem. there is an inversion of this argument
which is even more interesting: if the garbage we produce in step 1 is benign
that in itself is tremendously beneficial. this is something of a personal argument -
personal to me, a matter of personal interest to me ... but it also potentially
personalizes my whole argument vis a vis step 1 - possibly vis a vis
step 2 as well - in the sense that, as a proposition, people can
directly benefit from the discipline of producing benign garbage
in the garbage production phase, regardless of whatever outcomes
might be achieved vis a vis step 2 or vis a vis the entire question
of collectively producing no garbage.

also, i skipped a step in my argument. the additional benefit
of producing benign garbage in step 1 is that this will arguably make it
much easier to achieve step 2. it may even be true that producing
benign garbage in step 1 is essential to full realization of step 2.

it might be important, here, at this juncture, to caution
that the last assertion is not a foregone conclusion. in fact,
since this is a philosophical essay, it seems essential to point out
that some of my arguments here, which in some regards may be
called inarguable, may in fact not be inarguable at all. in particular
i am referring to the idea, well, the entire premise of the essay
to whit that we ought to stop producing problematic garbage -
though i was careful not to say we ought to do this, i suppose
perhaps that is what i mean. i really do feel that such an assertion
could be problematic in itself. to generalize it, it would be an
assertion that we ought to eliminate anything problematic, in
our existence, or in our approach to existence. the alternative
approach might be to think that whatever is problematic in
existence is in fact essential to existence. i wrote about taking a
more personal approach to something, and taking a more personal
approach to things generally might be reasonable. if we posit
that existence is an admixture of the benign and the problematic,
perhaps "the way" is to learn to surf the waves of these two
opposites and come out on top. in a similar vein (or, in this vein),
i voiced an aversion to political solutions, based on these being
problematic, but that might be a problematic side of my nature, too.

to bring this entire argument to a conclusion, i think i will introduce
a rather moribund thought, which is that our tendency, as a society,
towards the production of harmful garbage, which we could here
employ as a metaphor for harmful actions generally, could, and is
even likely to, bring about the demise of our society as a whole. let
me repeat my assertion regarding our propensity to produce harmful
garbage, now in the context of harmful actions generally: certainly
we benefit from our harmful actions. why should we, it can well be
argued, renounce the benefits of harmful action? for the benefit of
others? but isn't asking us to renounce benefits, which are manifestly
available to us through harmful action, a kind of harmful action
against us? it can be argued that, for certain reasons, this is not true,
but in a pragmatic sense that argument never completely holds up.
it is, i think, another instance of the the simultaneous truth of
opposites, which i discussed a little earlier in different terms. sometimes
one approach will produce the best result, and at other times, in other
circumstances, another, perhaps opposite approach will produce the
perhaps opposite approach will produce the best result. but, to continue
to my conclusion, i want to introduce an entirely other - if not entirely
different - problem. this problem is similar to the problem of garbage
in the sense that it is, like the problem of garbage, rather difficult to
contemplate. for one thing, it seems quite improbable that we can
devise any solution. for another thing, the implications, if we cannot
devise a solution, are, shall we say, unpleasant to contemplate.
with regard to the latter issue, though, and at the risk of seeming unreasonable -
perhaps with the certainty of seeming unreasonable (which, you will note,
 is a
contradiction in terms) - i think it is an interesting problem, because,
for one thing, i think there is some slight hope that it is soluble, and then,
if it can be solved, that implies something rather delightful. but, to go
ahead and voice this unthinkable thing, if the collapse of our world
as we know it is indeed inevitable, there remains the possibility of
individually surviving that collapse, and from this i devise a new
question, similar to the question of how to eliminate problematic garbage:
how to survive the end of the world. i will leave an actual discussion
of that for another time.