On the morning of September 16th, about 100 volunteers, including families, university students and groups of friends, showed up at Hooker Oak Park to join in on the 36th annual Butte Environmental Council’s Parks and Creeks Clean-up Day. Volunteers stood in line to get a BEC t-shirt, trash bags, gloves and a map of their chosen area and then took off to poke around bushes and creeks, picking up all the trash they could find and then bringing it back to the dumpster at Hooker Oak towards the end of the day.

I was there to photograph and document the event for BEC.

A huge dumpster, empty at first, gradually filled up as the people returned with their trash bags full. Other volunteers sorted the recyclables from the trash.

The trash would eventually end up in the landfill. It would seem good to know that this litter so carelessly discarded wherever one felt like dropping it would finally be appropriately processed. And of course there was a satisfaction in having it off the ground, but it was a satisfaction that was tempered in me because I had seen for myself what a landfill really is.

I had seen that you never really get rid of any material object. Nothing goes away. Everything goes “downstream” to be relocated in another place or form.

Curious about this, I once went to our local landfill to see where our trash ends up. I took with me a few items of trash to “throw away” so that I’d be let in, but with the intention of photographing what a landfill looks like.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The trash in the landfill soared 3-4 stories high, made up of stuff that people, like me, had thought we’d gotten rid of when the garbage truck came down the alley once a week and emptied our trash bin. But this mountain of trash proved that all that junk is still very much with us. It was just being covered up with a tons of dirt and acres of black plastic sheeting. There was a gigantic bulldozer pushing the trash around while another one covered the trash up. I saw a flock of California Gulls pecking around in the garbage that would fly up whenever the bulldozer came near. I saw garbage trucks coming and going as they added their loads to the landfill.

I took my photos and left.

The link between the global climate crisis we find ourselves in and this monument to wasted consumerism deeply unsettles me.  The scope of what we discard, items such as plastics made from oil, measures the scope of what we consume, and what we consume dictates the future of our one and only home, planet Earth.

We need to conserve, not the self-serving political Conservatism of our times, but actual conservation, in which we avoid the thoughtless grabbing and wasting that overwhelms the landfills of the nation.

September 17th, the day after the BEC cleanup, during the United Nations General Assembly, 75,000 people took to the streets of New York as part of a global protest against the use of fossil fuels.