NONSTOP FLIGHT---PHILLY TO SALT LAKE

Haiku

There's nothing, nothing

nothing, nothing, nothing, and

then there's Salt Lake City.

A while ago, I read that about 3% of the land in the United States has been developed. You don't really get a sense of the vast emptiness of America when you live in Philadelphia, with cheesesteak joints and taprooms on every corner, but an airplane ride from Philly to Salt Lake City, on a clear day, will straighten you out.

There's a lot of empty space even in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, though from 35,000 feet, you can usually see some evidence of human activity. But once Ohio flattens out, (“flatter than piss on a plate,” is how many Michiganders describe Ohio), you hit America's vast central craton, and there are long, long stretches of nothing.

The craton continues for a while. I guess this was the bit that got ironed out by the glaciers a while back. At first, a lot of it is farmland divided into neat little boxes. Then it isn't even worth farming any more, and then you start seeing hills and bigger hills and mountains. You have entered the basin and range part of your journey, and then THAT is all you see---basin and range, basin and range, basin and range. Nobody lives there. Nobody farms there. Even roads are hard to find.

At this point, you begin to wonder about recycling. In particular, you ask: why? Flying from Philly to Salt Lake on a clear day, you see 73 million-bazillion square miles of free landfill. Why this obsession with recycling in America? Why do cities and states spend tens of billions of dollars every year processing trash it would far cheaper and easier (and often, more environmentally responsible), to throw away? We could throw stuff away for thousands of years without even noticing it. Why don't we?

The main reason is a guy named J. Winston Porter, an EPA bureaucrat who, in 1989, wrote a paper entitled “The Solid Waste Dilemma: Agenda For Action.” A year before, the garbage barge Mobro 4000 had wandered up and down the East Coast for a few months looking for a place to dump its garbage and was featured on the network news every night. With the barge in everyone's consciousness, Porter's article claimed the US was running out of landfill space AND WE HAD TO START RECYCLING MORE!!!!!

It was never true. It's not true now. We have never faced a shortage of landfill space, as you can verify for yourself by flying from Philly to Salt Lake City on a clear day.

The only major item of trash it makes any economic sense to recycle is aluminum, which means that beer cans would be recycled without any government help whatsoever. In fact, a pickup truck stops at my curb every week before the recycling truck arrives and grabs my cans. No government is necessary, thank you.

All the rest of it, recycling the paper and glass and plastic, is just a waste of money.

Copyright2012MichaelKubacki