Among many other things, some positive and some negative, capitalism is a great generator of garbage. Our planet, like the fruit we buy in the supermarket, comes wrapped in plastic. We are the largest producers of garbage in history, as is verified daily in a city like Barcelona, which apparently generates much more waste than it can get rid of.
As if this were not alarming enough, for decades now we have been filling the space with debris, in a desperate attempt to get away from a world that is moving full steam ahead towards the apocalypse, as Elon Musk well knows.
An enigmatic painting by Paul Klee, Angelus novus (1920), gave the German philosopher Walter Benjamin the key to understanding what happens to us. The small watercolour, which Benjamin bought from the Swiss painter, depicts an angel walking backwards into a grim future. Benjamin interprets it like this:
“Where we perceive a chain of events, he (the angel) sees a single catastrophe that heaps ruin upon ruin and hurls it at his feet. He would like to stop, awaken the dead and mend what has been torn to pieces, but from Paradise he blows a hurricane that entangles his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This hurricane irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the debris before him rises skyward. That hurricane is what we call progress.”
Clearer, water, if it weren't for the fact that, in addition to the drought we are suffering from, the quality of the water we drink leaves much to be desired. And since there is no life without water, everything indicates that terrible wars will soon take place in order to obtain the coveted liquid.
As for the hurricane of progress, not even the staunchest denier can disprove Walter Benjamin's reason. But along with the shared need to get rid of the huge amounts of waste that we constantly produce, grows what the Anglo-Saxons call nimby, an acronym that means "not in my backyard." That is to say, that the garbage take it to the devil, since we do not want to see it.
For a long time, the mafia, in its eagerness to launder its outrageous illegal income, chose to invest in three businesses that cannot fail; namely: bread, undertakers and garbage, with garbage being by far the most profitable, especially in the toxic waste section.
Without our realizing it, our world is filling up with garbage dumps of all kinds, and our rulers, always overwhelmed by petty interim issues, happily cede the often criminal management of waste, even toxic waste, to the underworld.
Now, it is not only the lax Mediterraneans who turn a blind eye when it comes to getting rid of their junk, as it turns out that the Scandinavians, those very neat and efficient people, commit the same misdeeds when faced with the dilemma of what to do with so much Garbage, with so much polluting waste.
Yes, now we recycle more than ever, but it's not enough and it never will be. The recipe of the administrations is based on three Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle. But the garbage continues piling up in our houses, our streets, our cities, in the countryside and in the mountains, in the rivers and the sea, in the underground, in space and in cyberspace.
Our planet has been suffering from Diogenes syndrome for a long time and, for now, it seems that there is no one to cure it of such a harmful affliction. If we continue like this, the inheritance that we will leave to our grandchildren will stink like the organic waste container that the city council has maliciously placed on the sidewalk in front of our house.
