Trash and the Environment

Back in the 1970s when the USA really got serious about cleaning up the environment we worried about things like the tons of diapers in landfills, junk cars and dead fish in Lake Erie. That was before the day of the ubiquitous water bottle and tons of plastic packaging for every imaginable food item. Now all we hear is "eco-friendly," energy saving light bulbs, global responsibility, ethanol, and "cap and trade" or "carbon tax." Stop! Before you guys put one more business-ugly, recession-causing regulation in place, please take a trip to Turkey, Israel and Egypt and get a peek at the mounds and mounds of trash everywhere. Turkey and Egypt I can almost understand--they are developing countries, but Israel is only 60 years old and was settled and controlled in the early and mid-20th century by Europeans, not middle easterners. With all the knowledge and technology we have available today, this is completely NOT eco-friendly. We saw trash in poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods alike. Mounds and mounds of plastic bags and bottles; construction materials; old appliances; toilets; clothing. On road sides. In trees. In culverts. On sand dunes. In ruins. Only our ship and the docks seemed free of trash. Obviously, socialist governments and planned economies don't pick up trash, or if they do, they have no plan to bury, recycle or burn it. It's probably an "extra" like a decent teacher-to-student ratio classrooms or timely operations for health.

This is the roof of a home seen in Israel, Arab I think. The lower part of the roof is stacked with trash--including broken furniture and pieces of a toilet. The upper part is just bedding and clothing airing. The father and son are raking dirt over rocks and trash, maybe to plant something. The hillside was littered also. We're looking down, but the same view was curb side, especially where there was construction. In Egypt, they are enclosing the canals because the people used them to throw trash.

Meanwhile, American business has a gun pointed at the head to clean up or else. If this really is just a big marble in space where we're all in it together, what going on in the middle east?