A friend told me about a time he met a Navajo Indian on a reservation in Arizona. The Navajo man tossed a can he was drinking from out onto the open ground. Taken aback, my friend questioned him about his act of littering, asking him if he cared about his land or not. The Navajo man responded by saying, “Over here, over there, what’s the difference? Are we really doing something by burying it?”
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So true. The idea of taking our garbage to the landfill, burying it or burning it doesn’t solve the problem of <a href="http://www.themindfulword.org/2013/food-waste-nrdc-report/">waste</a>. It only manages it. We’re only fooling ourselves by hiding our junk. This man had the foresight to see that we as a society are immature children unwilling to clean up our rooms, opting instead for the easy way out: hide our mess in the closet. Hide it for another day—another generation will deal with it.

Unlike the child who has a mother to nag him until he cleans his room, humanity has no such watchful eye. We can go ahead and pollute as much as we want, wherever and whenever we want, but we’re not fooling anyone.

A messy room means a messy mind. So why not expose the mess for all to see. That messy room is much more likely to get cleaned up and dealt with than the junk in the closet that can collect dust for lifetimes until it becomes so overwhelming we explode in a sneezing fit. And in acknowledging the mess and dealing with it we inevitably heal ourselves.

Much of the world lives surrounded by its own litter. Seeing garbage strewn across the banks of an otherwise beautiful river or padding the green grass of an urban park are sorry sights. But they are <em>truthful</em> sights. They expose the truth of our highly consumptive, wasteful ways. And in exposing the truth, they make us think. Seeing this can touch the disgust within, causing us to think twice before consuming mindlessly. And the ever-present reminders follow us wherever we go: consume less, consume <a href="http://www.themindfulword.org/">mindfully</a>.

Consumption has a price. It doesn’t matter how eco-friendly the packaging is or how advanced the incineration system that deals with waste, there is a cost to all waste because, according to the Law of Conservation of Matter, matter cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form. And what of the energy of conversion? Converting things to trash can’t do anything good for our energetic space since we see waste as a negative thing.

Consumption and waste are two sides of the same coin. We waste largely because we overconsume. And we overconsume largely because we waste.

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<em><a href="https://plus.google.com/101556749885182449997">Kiva Bottero</a> edits and writes for the Engaged Living Network. You can read his writing at <a href="http://www.themindfulword.org">The Mindful Word</a>, <a href="http://greenbuildingcanada.ca">Green Building Canada</a>, <a href="http://www.greenhomegnome.com">Green Home Gnome</a> and <a href="http://www.greenhousegnome.com">Greenhouse Gnome</a>.</em>