A human touch- the power of distribution

If there is one pithy thing that can be said about our churn-and-burn era of disposable goods, it’s that future archeologists will be most grateful for all the data points.

We learn much from studying the waste and refuse piles of ancient civilizations, and in some cases these leavings are all that remain; such sites can provide a rich ‘cultural snapshot’ of a people’s lifestyle. With-in the materials they choose to eschew, is a story about how people spent their time, what they ate, what they like to craft with, and how they related to their environment.

It is hard to know what someone might make of our garbage, as it is certain to be a pungent and eclectic mix of consumer goods, asbestos, CDs, VHS, eight-tracks, industrial waste, vinyls, bio-medical waste, a few wax gramophone cylinders and a million, million little plastic baggies of all shapes and sizes (many which will include a neatly preserved sample of our canine companion’s poop.) An epic and utterly ambiguous time capsule, really- future crypto-archeologists will likely spend hours, or years, trying to decode the information contained on VHS copies of ‘Whose the Boss?’ or ‘Reno 911!’

This is assuming, of course, that the climate crisis does not cause our extinction first.



It is hard to move without leaving a mark nowadays. Every transaction with society now seems to involve some plastic, or gas, electricity, if not directly, then by proxy of some service provider who relies on industry. It is inevitable that We make a footprint: how can we determine its ultimate impact?

It may be too much to get people to stop littering, even accidentally. In developing nations where there is no organized trash service, the fragments of industrial goods fill the ditches and swales (in Haiti, even water is sold by the quart in little factory sealed plastic bags.) People cannot keep track of so many little things- all the little extras that come with consumer products. In the western world we pay someone to throw it out of sight, and I can’t help but wonder if people here would be more activated about our ecological crisis if they had to look at their mess every day.

Littering- leaving behind that which we don’t need, is an ecological process: it is one of the many ways that nature redistributes material. When the scraps are fragments of biodegradable materials, we actually contribute to the ecosystem by transporting these goods (rich in calories, or rare minerals, or nitrogen.) to organisms who might not otherwise have access. City rats and crows depend on this ‘spill over.’ However, it will take millions of years for a species to evolve a practical use for industrial spillover- oil or plastics or heavy metals, save for a few hermit crabs who have found a container that was made to fit (incidentally.)

Even animals litter! Those who have tended chickens know: a gang of these single minded omnivores will scatter a large, tasty, bug infested brush pile in only a few hours. ‘Chaotic’ or ‘noisey’ distribution processes feed every layer of the food chain.

What does this mean for us? To try and ‘prevent’ nature, human or otherwise, is like trying to bat a rainstorm away, and yet we are also reaching a ‘critical mass’ of plastic contamination, where it is in the air, the water, the soil. Actually this is a false dilemma: the plastic tends to make its way into nature whether or not we litter (as mentioned, trash cans are simply taken to garbage piles.) The notion that this problem is solely in the hands of consumers is the result of a successful spin campaign by the petroleum industry in the 70’s, which put the responsibility for the noticeable build up of non-biodegradable goods on ‘litterbugs.’ (rather than the companies who decided that plastic fragments everywhere was an acceptable ‘externality’ in their profit model)

The truth is, we will lose fragments and scraps from time to time whether we want to or not. Littering is a natural ecological process, as unpreventable as the tides. Our consumer goods must be made of ecologically neutral materials, or better yet, we could leverage this widespread natural tendency to some advantage:

For example, some organizations have decided to pursue solutions for a particularly pernicious sub-group of litterers: smokers. There are many billions of smokers, and many hundreds of billions of plastic filters which enter the environment every year.

“Green-Butts” (www.green-butts.com) is a research and development company which is investigating designs for a biodegradable hemp filter. These degrade in as little as seven days, as opposed to the 5-10 year ‘groundlife’ of a typical filter.

“Karma-tips” (www.karmatips.in) offers a similar handcrafted product, and has innovated a ‘Butts to Buds’ filter design which houses wildflower seeds. Plains and forest fires are a natural part of the ecological cycle, such that some plant species use heat as a signal to start growing (as the competition has likely been leveled!)

Other alternative products have become more visible in consumer products: anyone who has recently attended an outdoor event will notice the new organic utensils and plates. Larger goods are being created by artists who pour a mix of fungal precursors and sawdust into a mold which, with time, grows into a robust chair or table; just think, not more lonely abandoned furniture left to die in shame allow residential roads or in ditches. Instead the owner can break up the product and incorporate it into the soil, or into another mold with more fungus food to grow something else.


In our journey towards peaceful co-existence, a theme continually re-emerges: shall we resist nature’s tendency (destructively, but sometimes necessarily, as in the case of cancer), or be carried by it, just as a sailor catches the wind. By harnessing our natural tendencies, we harness nature’s energy into emergent capacities, unlocking hitherto unconceivable solutions. Just as nature gathers, so it distributes… As a natural and unavoidable consequence of our gathering of natural resources from the sea/earth/land, there will be an equal and opposite level of redistribution. Rather than trying to ‘cease’ or ‘kill’ this process, we should be asking ourselves with earnest curiosity: “what things are useful to redistribute? And where do they need to go?”

If we then ask, “who goes there?” and “what are they already distributing naturally?”, we suddenly identify a network of material transfer which could, with little infrastructure or centralized organization, be deployed as a massive ‘many-hands’ labour force (under the right conditions.) To what end? As ecological change continues to accelerate, I believe that there will be many problems that require similarly decentralized solutions.