If I do say so myself, what the heck is wrong with some folks these days? Here I am a recovering landfill. Yes, at one time I was an active dump, for sure some might’ve called me a junkie, but I’ve been officially closed now for several decades and have been trying to get back to my natural state ever since.
You know, maybe I’ll never be the pristine desert I was before being used as a receptacle for all wastes human, track marked and scared as I am, but I’m trying to heal, trying to mend…and while back in the day admittedly, I did find some worth in the fact that being a dump was a much needed vocation (it is so nice to feel useful), it is without question illegal to dump on me today. Yet I still feel the weight of heavy laden pickups all too often rolling across my arid topography, the plop of their cargo on my soils, and their rapid retreat back whence they came. Evidently some of you still think it’s okay to leave a bunch of garbage in the desert? Well I’m here today to say it’s not.
Forget the legality of dumping on me for a moment; let’s talk the morality of such a practice. How bipolar is your moral compass? How in the world can you in good conscience toss a pile of crap out the back of your pickup truck with this most grand of vistas as your backdrop? This is your back yard for heaven’s sake! This is our back yard, the Eastern Sierra, one of the most awe inspiring stretches of scenery from the Golden Gate to the Brooklyn Bridge and yet you take it for granted with a blatant indifference for an aphorism you should have learned in grade school! What right do you have, this disrespect for the land, for the dust, the sand, the dirt, the critters, the brush? Are you trying to stick it to the man for raising the fees at the dump? An “I’ll show him!” or something? Well you’re not showing him anything; honestly you’re just shitting where you eat!
My guess is that you cannot do it in good conscience, that’s just it, which explains why you sneak in at night, in the darkness, letting that deep dark, that great hider of deviance, veil your sight and your stunted conscience as you selfishly cover this beautiful place with your little piles of rot and rubbish.
Enough already! I may have been a dump at one time but that was years ago, I’m trying to repair myself…but you, you keep…you keep…dammit! – sorry, I’m getting a little emotional here…it’s just that there’s a perfectly good and legal landfill down the road. Go there. It may cost you a few bucks but please, let me heal. Let me be a desert again.
l am totaly with you and would never litter or dump illigally but we need to have a complet landfill that can take all of are toxic wastes also,ther is nowhere to take railroad ties so what do you do with them?
Thanks for the comment. The deal with Bishop/Sunland is that it’s old and unlined. Modern landfills have liners and leachate collection systems that will collect all the soluble nasties that percolate down from hazardous wastes. They do have a household haz program from time to time to bring in small quantities of paint and other toxics and there is discussion about bringing in a roll-off to handle the treated lumber/rr-tie issue…that one is troublesome.
For those of us with an innate, learned, or other deeply engrained reverence for “nature”, the sight of discarded human waste in the landscape (including the landfills for which I take partial responsibility) elicits a spectrum of emotions often dominated by a very dark and disturbing sense of anger and hatred towards the perpetrator(s). How can anyone, so callously, disrespect the land we hold as sacred? I’ve tried to think this through rationally, hoping I might hit on some solution. Each time I come to the same conclusion. They just don’t get or see it the way we do, and for a multitude of reasons and causes. Recognizing this, I can only conclude that changing what we perceive as misguided behavior, be it innate, learned or other, would require a remaking or reshaping and firing of the mold, and that’s not going to happen. Fortunately, these folks are the exception and not the rule, and they tend to head back to the same haunts to do their dirty deed. So, I’m afraid, for now at least, that patch of desert so desirous of returning to the health and vigor of time before civilization, will simply have to endure the human trash that delivers and leaves it’s ugly stain. Thanks for the topic. Like that it’s spoken from the perspective of the soil, plants and other life at the site. Reminder that we can all do better.