Dear Editor,
I have friends, siblings and in-laws scattered over most of North America and I hear from them about troubles that occur in their areas. One brother in southern Illinois has to deal with occasional flooding and tornadoes. Another, in North Carolina sees side effects of hurricanes and flooding, including overflow from giant pig farms’ effluent pits. In Mexico, a sister-in-law’s husband is sick with COVID-19.
These are tragedies we are relatively safe from here in the Pontiac. We have had . . .
flooding, and that has exacerbated one problem that we do have here, as much as anywhere else. This weekend, I came face-to-face with the results of that problem: waste. Leftover superfluity, items too good to throw away, someone might make use of that someday. At our country home, we had such things stored in a tarp garage — not a common one, but a really good quality one, with sturdy supports and tough plastic skin. But after years of its surviving, through being shovelled off after major snowstorms, it collapsed when I wasn’t there to shovel it. All those things we put in there for future projects that we now know are not going to happen, laid to waste. Those things were rain-soaked and reduced to garbage. Over the weekend, we hauled away much of it, as Thorne was having a large item junk day at the waste transfer station. Apparently, we were not alone in our zealous load-out. By Sunday, all the bins were full to overflowing. Citizens who had taken the extra effort to sort out recyclables were shocked to see everything thrown into the general garbage bin, which itself was overfull.
This is the curse of our age, we have too much stuff. Cheap electronic devices, which are outmoded before they’re worn out, chairs and furniture which would have been repaired back in the day when people did that sort of thing, collections of magazines — remember when people read and retained words and pictures printed on paper? Now soaked and rendered useless.
We have too much stuff and not enough space to store it. What can we do about this? There has been talk of a local incinerator operation being built and I reluctantly admit that it looks like the least-worst route out of our present quagmire. I say reluctantly, because this option is not really an ecological boon — it’s just disaster relief, because waste piling up is going to choke us, before an earthquake or a hurricane or, hopefully, before COVID-19 finds us hiding out here in the land of few disasters, the Pontiac.
Robert Wills
Thorne and Shawville, Que.
