On Landfills

Landfills pretty much sum-up human existence.
Nothing shows our society's hypocrisy and blatant neglect for what we depend on more than a several-mile-long mound of dirt hiding everything we don't want.

I'm sure the concept of the landfill came about at a time when it actually worked; you have poop, foodscraps, and other early-human-type waste that you don't want to carry around with you, so you leave it lying around, or bury it in the ground so you don't have to deal with the smell. Over the years it either biodegrades and ends up fertilizing a tree, or fossilizes and becomes the subject of archiological debate for several decades.

However, ever since, say, the industrial revolution, landfills have stopped working.
All of a sudden we're dumping harmful, concentrated chemicals into the ground. Our excuse? Because it costs too much money to dispose of them in a way that's environmentally sound.
So we bury it and let future generations deal with it.

New York City disposes of 11,000 TONS of garbage... EVERY DAY.
It takes 9 miles of semi trailors to haul this trash away from the city... 550 trucks.
And where do they go?
Well, obviously there isn't a landfill in NYC. They go to, you know... VIRGINIA, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey... these 550 trucks travel up to 300 miles (and back again) EVERY DAY just to get rid of New York's garbage.
Do you know how ridiculous that is?

As evidenced there, we go to great lengths to bury our trash; to put it out of sight and then eventually built baseball fields on it or use it to heat UNH.

I'm surprised you don't hear more environmental groups making noise about landfills... probably because few people have come up with better solutions. The gist of it is, though, the earth is at the end of its ability to support our waste, let alone our resource demands.

What is my point?
The fact that we have a glorious industry of curb-workers, spikey steamroller operators, semi-drivers, and corporate management dedicated to hiding away what we don't want. If we pay Waste Management to deal with our waste, we don't have to think about it.

Think about that.
Landfills are an excuse for our garbage. We can't see it anymore, so it's no longer our problem. In terms of daily life, most people don't give a thought to the amount of garbage that they use.
...almost as if we forget it exists.....

For centuries, Science has made a point about objectivity.
You need to have proof, hard evidence, etc in order to make any grounded scientific claim.
But just because you can't make a legitimate scientific claim doesn't mean that something doesn't exist.
An alien could walk the surface of the earth and not see any open landfills, and he might come to the conclusion that humans don't throw away our waste, because we hide it so well. Little would he know that we bury millions of tons of it every week.
That alien would be ignorant of the environmental disaster that our society is.

Can you think of anything else that we can't see, and therefore doesn't exist?
of course you can!
In Romans 6:23, Paul says, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."[NIV]
That's right... death!
from what?
Sin!

Our society does an excellent job of pretending that sin doesn't exist.
Nay, we glorify it!
We pretend that it doesn't have any consequences, because, well, we can't exactly see it. It's not particularly tangible.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, however.
It just means that it's easy for us, as a society, to forget that it's there. It's easy for people to ignore the Truth and live as if New York City isn't spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to prevent itself from drowning in its own waste.

Maybe its time for people to take environmental action.
Maybe its time for people to wake up, stop being ignorant, and lose the hypocrisy.