It’s something to chew over, watching those massive trucks haul north from the Southern Tier expressway through Wine Country and the Finger Lakes to the massive dumping grounds next to the Montezuma Bird Refuge.

Junked televisions and kitchen appliances, plastic milk jugs, junk mail, rotten fruit and meat scraps, smashed and commingled all together as a mass known as garbage. Something people paid to get of in the massive mounds that border historic Seneca Falls, in hundreds of acres former wetlands, strip mined, and stacked with mounds of garbage high in the air.

I tossed that plastic cup, the napkin and spoon into the bucket I have for camp garbage. Like the outlaw smoking grass on federal lands, I’ll burn it up the next time I have a fire. Those smoldering burn barrels down in Pennsylvania had a rather putrid smell, but I’ll burn it hot, turn it into mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, soon to be absorbed back in the land.

But even I concede that’s not a sustainable or urban solution – we already have too much carbon dioxide in the air and incinerators burn all municipal waste with all kinds of chemicals, a bit in a controlled fashion but 24-7 usually in a dense urban area. And even I concede with my fires I can’t burn everything – some things are really noxious to burn and other things don’t burn or burn very poorly.