Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site Trip

As we entered the site of the landfill I wondered, where is all the trash? All I could see were a few rolling hills and some trucks with trailers. The landfill I imagined was dirty, smelly and a terrible place to live anywhere near. DADS had none of those characteristics. When the tour began, our guide began explaining that all of the hills I saw were actually massive piles of trash. I was floored. How could one camouflage so much trash so well and make it appealing to the eye with no smell? The fact that they could take something so ugly and make it look as if Earth itself had placed it there was amazing. I took this picture from the bus, hence the glare, because I thought it demonstrated how natural the landfill appears to be. No one would ever guess or question that the hill in this picture was in fact trash. The hill stands one hundred and fifty feet tall. Instantly my entire vision of a landfill changed.  It wasn't disgusting or gross, but instead well kept and almost even pleasant. But maybe that was part of our problem. Since the trash is hidden so well, nobody cares to make a change. It is out of sight and out of mind. As David Orr has stated in Earth in Mind, our educational system is failing us in this area of study.  Education needs to include the teaching of morals and our ecological impact because “education [does] not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity” (Orr, 7). Orr explains that “what is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, and thoughtfulness” because if the people we look up to make the right choices then we will tend to also (14). They alone cannot fix the problem though, Orr says, “institutions capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations” to further reach into people’s minds and hearts to teach them the right thing to do (14). The day our businesses became sustainable will be the day we can start to fix our planet. We began driving through the hills, which were all actually trash in disguise. When we reached the top we found the landfill that I had been expecting. The smell finally reached me, trash was flying everywhere, and somehow from the shins down I was covered in dirt just from walking around. There must have been ten trucks full of trash dumping the loads into the mountain in making. I thought that if everyone had at least some ecoliteracy of the insane amount of trash that we as a society are pouring into the Earth, we would see the change that Orr has demanded. The trash would no longer be out of sight and out of mind but in the forefront of our discussions and concerns. It is one thing for everyone to hear about what goes on at a landfill, but for everyone to actually see and become educated about the subject could change the world.