The status of our environment in 1961 via Steinbeck

Being unemployed, I am getting through some of the books that have been on my shelf for quite sometime and am uncovering things I never knew I would find. Last night for instance I started Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. One passage I found quite insightful about the status of American consumption and what it does to the earth comes within the first 30 pages of the book.

"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash- all of them- surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index...I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness-chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in sea."

Steinbeck wrote this book in 1961 and even then he knew what we were destined to become. I believe that we are probably better at hiding our trash, but it doesn't mean it's not there and it's not doing the same damage it was doing 40 years ago.