Trashing the world

When I was asked to take a picture on the field trip of the landfill or the recycling center; I figured that an ordinary picture of a pile of trash wouldn’t be enough to show what we are doing to our environment every day. Instead, I took a picture of my foot in the ashy-sand that disguises the entire trash mountain. This is my way of saying, this is what our world could look like someday if everybody keeps ignoring this problem of not caring about how much trash they actually use in a day. In our culture it is easy to ignore the amount of trash an individual creates each day. Whether you misplace a plastic water bottle in the trash that will take 30 to 40 years to disintegrate into the environment or you order too much food and don’t eat it all; you are contributing to the problem in one way or another. Further more, every time you eat something imagine the trash it creates, from the wrapping it was in to the utensils you used to eat it. It all adds up immensely and the awareness of where it all goes needs to be known by everybody. As Fritjof Capra mentions in his book The Web of Life, “There are solution to the major problems of our time, some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values” (Capra, 4). Capra suggests that we need to change and that if we don’t, soon enough it will be too late for any improvement because of the damage we have caused to our environment. He states that animals are becoming extinct at higher rates than ever and it’s because our world is so much in debt that we are using resources we don’t need. I completely agree with Capra’s concept of systems theory and I believe there are many ways we can improve our environment by getting one more person committed to do so every day.

     The shoe print represents the impact I can have on this problem and the realism of how small my personal impact actually matters on a larger scale. As somebody who religiously recycles (just because I always have and it was engraved in me at a young age) I would like to feel like every piece of paper or can I recycle and every bottle I pull out of the trash is making some sort of impact; when in reality, it isn’t.