I left my geography class and began the long decent down the stairs towards the library. The sky was blue, birds were chirping and the sun tickled my face with its magical touch. It had been over a week since I had gotten a good dose of sun so I decided to take a moment and sit in the garden to admire the view while I absorbed some much needed vitamin D. My head was still ringing with facts from class. I finished reading a textbook that was far scarier than any horror movie I had ever seen. The book was titled Natural Capitalism and was packed full of facts about the current state of our world. Facts like; in the last thirty years we have used more than half of our world’s natural resources, there is a swirling garbage heap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is larger than the state of Texas, and the average American creates one million pounds of garbage per person per year.
I sat in the garden watching poi surface every once and a while and I pondered their small world. I noticed how large the fish are for the little pond. With all of them defecating every day, the pond should be uninhabitable, but the poi are fine. The water is still clean enough to support them. Why? Because unlike the waste we produce as humans, the waste produced by the poi isn’t actually waste. It contains no toxins and therefore it is able to remain within the food chain and become food for another organism in the pond. Nature has figured out the perfect closed loop cycle to the keep the environment within the pond balanced. Within nature there is no waste! I began to think if only man could rejoin the cycle and eliminate waste we could live in harmony with nature once again.
But would it be possible to eliminate waste while continuing to develop our technological world? If we could take the toxins out of the things we produce than they would remain in the food chain and would eventually be food for another living being, be it a plant, worm or slug. Is it possible to make plastic without toxins? Maybe I don’t really know. They make biodegradable plastic grocery bags. Maybe in a few years they’ll make biodegradable water bottles. I began to think about what the future is going to bring.
Suddenly I could hear live music coming from the direction of the library. I got up and began walking towards it. I was still thinking about the future. If all goes well I’ll be alive for another fifty or sixty years. I began to think about the changes the world will go through during my lifetime. Would I live to see a day in which man rejoined the closed loop, waste free cycle of nature?