Now, of course, things are way different.  In just the past few years, we have suffered through, first, “the absurdity of ad campaigns claiming four-wheel-drive SUVs as the only tools available to us for accessing nature, and then, the “ad campaigns claiming hybrid SUVs as the only tools available to us for saving nature.” 

Managing our waste, maintains Dach, is about managing our desire—not an easy thing in today’s world of attractive and attainable goods.  But we forget the flip side of the equation—what Dach calls “a sequence of rapidly shrinking gardens.”  Counting backwards fifty years, he starts at his grandparents’ hundreds of acres of farmlands, winnows down to his parents’ vegetable garden, and then even further to “the infrequent pot of basil” on his own windowsill. 

No one wants to go back to Dach’s mother’s days, when the only chewing gum available was picked off the side of the road, brushed clean, and shared between siblings.  Indeed, Dach doesn’t believe we need to go back to the land—just that we need to bring the land into the cities, through community gardens, CSAs, farmers markets, and the like.

Our having left food production behind as garden sizes shrunk means that we’re trusting it to sources way beyond our vision and control  “It makes about as much sense as paying to have somebody blow air into your lungs through an extremely long tube,” writes Dach.  “Only, the air has kind of a stale, farty taste after traveling so far, and the mechanical pump that is doing all of the work is a real bitch of a gas-guzzler.”