We Are All In This Together

When i look at the whole earth image above the first thing i notice is the lack of political borders. There's ocean and deserts, there's mountain ranges and rivers, grasslands and glaciers, watersheds and wetlands but there's a definite  dearth of political borders. The surveyor's lines are invisible to the salmon, mussels, oysters, cod, shrimp and orcas, among the countless fauna and flora that have long thrived here in the little corner of paradise sometimes called the Salish Sea.

The truth is there are no borders, we are all in this together. There are watersheds who share a common karma so might qualify as boundaries of a sort, there are shorelines where land and ocean meet, there is the surface of our tiny common planet where the solid and the liquid meets the gaseous but even along these lines everything is constantly in flux.

"There is no there out there", as a friend of mine said the other day, "everywhere is here". As the earth rotates the jet-stream and other high atmospheric winds assure that both the life giving rain and Fukushima's fallout will too along with the nano-sized dioxin particles that are distributed everywhere. Because everywhere is 'here' there is nowhere to escape the pollutants produced by mankind's materialistic madness.

This is the last in a series of Mud Reports that started out talking about a garbage incinerator scheme that the corporate colossus wants to build in our Powell River paradise. Who knows if it'll ever come about, it's already sounding more and more like Vancouver is moving towards generating far less waste through its own Zero Waste programs and consequently may not need to replace their current Cache Creek land-filling scheme with any other than waste reduction itself.

Of course that, waste reduction, is the real key, the only 'real' solution to our waste management problems here in Powell River, or Vancouver's, or yours - wherever you live. It only makes sense that the best way to reduce waste is to reduce our consumption of crap in the first. The crap, the pollution, the by-products of our collective wants know no boundaries. It's in our common air, our common water, it's on our common land. We breath it, we drink it, we eat it, we feed it to our kids everyday because everywhere is 'here'. We are all in this together and the only escape is to 'want-less', to consume less, to create less waste.