WMMHFBY lEEPRSISýWEJ>NESDAYeNOVUEIR 22-1.,18~PAGE 7 PAGE SEVEN THRE CONSUMIIVE SOCIETY . The last hundred years bas seen a lot of drastic changes inour societybut economists point to the creation of the Dk @g consumer society as one of the most important~4$ Unfortunately the consumer society has become synonomous with the"ýwasteful society" -.. This is recydling week. Recycling is the currently en ~. vogue answer to garbage. But recycling is only a small part of the solution - more important is reduction. If we are to avoid burying ourselves, we have to drastically reduce our waste. The pioneers wasted nothing - everything was either .~ eaten,'burned for fuel, or returned to the soil Without ~...... knowing anything about ecology, they practised it out of The single most important innovation that created our garbage problem is, simply, garbage collection. If you can put .4 it out at the curb once a week and it disappears, then, of course, you do. If you had to take it to the dump yourself, you would waste a lot less. Garbage collection was "lnvented" for aesthetic as well as "- public bealth reasons - garbage is neither nice to look at nor M S O healthy to have around; yet the growth in the amount ofMIJ ON YD E garbage has nothing to do with healtb or aesthetics; it has __________________________________________ everthing to do wtb out-of-sight, out-of-mind. ------___________________________________ As a child, we spent our summers at a cottage in a fairly isolated area of Muskoka. It was like an apprentlceship in non-consumption. We had no garbage collection, no running generation pioneer faim familles and had grown up on faims. - At the time I took it ahl for granted, but I realize now that they had a pioneerlng self-sufficiency that was already extremely rare by the 1950's. In the faîl, wlnter and sprlng we lived a normal clty life, but in the summer we lived like pioneers - nothing was wasted. The wood stove was both cookng appliance and <-garbage cierator. Cookçing wlth wood is not a matter of ~ttrnirg knob the right heat is produced by the ight size and quantity of wood mixed with the rlght amount of air . '# (draft). My mother could cook anything from a leg of pork to -an angel food cake better than most modemn homemakers wt Il hi ies thermostats and temperature probes~. ~.. What we didn't eat was either burnt or retumned to the ground. Paper, plastics, bones, meat and fatty wastes were burnt while vegetable wastes. were scattered in the forest where they quickly rotted or, more likely, were eaten by the chipmunks and squirrels. Tin cans were burnt to remove the layer of tin so they would quickly rust into the soil. Anythlng that waspurcheased in a glass container was chosen so that the bottle could be reused for jams or préserves. Ashes from the wood stove were also scattered in the woods where the mineraI nutrients would return to the soil. Anythlng that couîd not be reused and wouîd not rot, rust or burn was either burled or carted back to the city at the end of the summer. One or two paper bags of dry ýV"' O indestructible gaibage was aIl that would be Ieft after two months of "roughing lt'1. Water wasn't wasted either. We had a weIl at the bottom ANDREm KERR'S BULACKSMJTH SHOP, ASHBUIRN, 1891 of a bill behlnd the cottage with an old-fashioned hand pump. Andrew Kerr operated a blacksmith shop in Ashburn opposite the store on the Ashburn Road Every drop had to be purnped and then carrled upthat«hill. utl10 hnh moved to Toronto. He died in Agincourt in 1936 and is buried in Burnsd balance that put back as much as hie took. The advent of urbanization took away that bond and the current garbage ~YEB G crisis is a direct result. 75 ' 'E eition o Waste reduction is not a pipedream. Whlle politicians -o the Thursday, 4November 19, eiio fthe argue over whether it should be 40% or 50%, wbether in 5 or WHI'TY GAZETTE AND CH[RONICIZ in 10 yeais, I know fromn experience that 95% is not only The Town Couneil is reoeiving residenta' applications to conneet to the new sanitary sewer possible but was practised by vlrtually everybody only a- sytm. couple of generations ago. People have responded well to the Prisoners fromn the Guelph Reformatory are used as laborers in building the new Ontario Blue Box program, and have sbown a wllingness to change.* Hosital at the lake. A few cairots,, a few sticks,, some new laws to reduce The Ontario County Old Girls' Association is colecting warm clothing and provisions to be packaging and increase markets for used or recycled goods sent to, war-ravaged Belgium. Joseph Pierson is the contractor for the new Standard Bank branch at. Broklin. and we will have solved the crisis that is upon us. New dumps will only encourage the extension of the problem. _________________________________________ - ýj *j9~ ~ #- )