Nice.

If we really cared, we would levy the full cost of disposal at the point of manufacture and again at the point of sale.

I don’t think it’s laziness, though, that causes us not to. It’s dominance. The hereditary Europeans only cared about conquering, always moving forward. This behavior was rewarded with new continents and a seemingly endless stream of new resources. Any individual or culture that spent their time caring for what they already had was outflanked and run over by the cheerful marauders, and now that the limits of every continent have been reached, the pressure is turned inward in the sublime oppression of consumeristic optimism that demands we ignore the waste. Don’t want to be a dour sourpuss washing and re-using Ziplocs — it doesn’t play on the ‘gram. Traveling, eating — consuming — that’s what we want to see. Our mainstream tastes are scarcely a notch above feeder porn.

Another thing we might do, if we really cared, is force people to store their trash inside their own home. The way the garbage simply vanishes lets us shield ourselves from the awful reality. As the commercial trash company ad says: “Just point. [We] can make garbage disappear. ‘And that’s why they all start dancing.’” (*shudder*) If your trash had nowhere to go, you’d behave fundamentally differently. Plastic would be replaced with ceramics, that we would protect with our very lives; and once our vain attempts to preserve said ceramics inevitably run their course (no pottery lasts forever, Puff), they can be crushed and ground up to dust.

We likely can’t collectively relearn our rewards structure overnight, but that’s what we have to do, if we’re going to survive. We likely won’t. We are the children of a destructive universe after all. Others look to the sky and see heaven. I see a violent clash of energies, of which we are a sad microcosm. Sad, because the accident of evolution has given us the tools to transcend it, if only we choose to.