Maybe we should litter..

I've been reading Paul Shepard, "Where We Belong", and wanted to share some of his thoughts that I found striking. There has been a building aggression in my mind, the more I hear about recycled content and sustainable materials, and building - when the obvious contradiction that no one seems to admit is that the most sustainable building practice is to not build at all. To make his point, the words are strong and ideas provocative, even if disturbingly so. I find myself wondering why sustainability has taken the market driven course it has when there were scholars publishing such words as early as the 1960s..

"If you must have some symbolic actions, I recommend the following: throw your wrappers, papers, butts anywhere, beer cans in the streets, bottles on the berms and terraces; uproot and cut down all ornamental trees and replace them with native fruit-bearing trees and bushes; sabotage all watering systems on all lawns everywhere; pile leaves, manure, and garbage among growing things; return used oil, tires, mattresses, bedsprings, machines, appliances, boxes, foil, plastic containers, rubber goods, and all other debris to their origins - seller or manufacturer, whichever is easier - and dump them there; unwrap packages in the place of purchase and leave the wrappings.

When this has gone on long enough, some tokens of the glut of overconsumption will at least be evident. Equally important, there will be less refuge from the countryside with its regimented monocultures, scalped slopes, poisoned rivers, and degraded rangelands. Our society goes for letting it all hang out, so let's do it. Are encounter groups in? Let's raise the encounter a whole octave and confront the real human ecosystem that we live in. Some great Avon lady keeps rouge on the cheeks of the middle-class neighborhood, the industrial park, and the college campus; the same tinsel earth mother in whose name the slaughterhouse is hidden, the zoo's dead are unobtrusively replaced, and the human dead are pseudo-fossilized." (Shepard, 'Ugly is Better')

Granted, any "civilized" place would never act by these measures, but a point still stands.. If we all had to live in the refuse which we produce, perhaps everyone would be forced to second think their habits?