SF Now - Recycling, Start at the Beginning, not the End.

It's always with a certain amount of wonder and disbelief whenever I hear that a new recycling or waste initiative has been launched. The people who consume the products are being asked to be responsible for sorting waste, pay for the cost of dealing with the waste and it's the consumers who are seen as the problem. International organisations harass governments, who send directives to councils, who then pass the buck to us.

But our consuming has been carefully encouraged and nurtured, we're only doing what we've been told to do. If we were to curb our consumption of goods, the world and its economies would quickly be in trouble. The real problem lies in production. If something can be made, it should be able to be unmade at the end of its life, with a similar regard to waste created in production and destruction.

It's a sobering thought to think that an awful lot of the things you've thrown away, still exist in some deep dark landfill pit, like guilt pushed to the back of your mind, you can probably feel it's uncomfortable presence at times. Food decomposes, but many other items last for a considerable time and without any external forces beyond some pressure and a little groundwater, aren't going to be going anywhere soon.

While it may seem exciting or informative to find junk from the last few thousand years, it's doubtful whether our ancestors who will have to deal with levels of 'archaeological finds' on an unprecedented scale will feel quite as enthusiastic. Perhaps these will end up being mined for the valuable plastics and metals they contain, perhaps they will come back to haunt us in unimaginable ways.

The truth is, human society is continuing to destroy the ecosystem we live in, and as we do our best to reduce complexity and diversity the more chance of a serious eco-crash happening. It won't destroy all life on the planet, but it will probably get rid of us. At the end, when we've had the clothes of our civilisation and society stripped away from us, when we're once more just naked animals, then we'll perhaps appreciate the power of the natural world once more. Just before it delivers the killing blow.

But if we're going to survive as a society and a species, then we need to evolve in our thinking and lifestyles. Capitalism is going to have to pay a heavy cost for ecology, everything we make and use needs to be redesigned and we need to plan for the future, not merely ten years down the line, but hundreds, if not thousands of years. We may have to slow progress and learnt to live without the rapid advances we've seen across the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

Because technology, which is often seen as our potential saviour, won't be able to help alone. Digital creatures collecting grains of plastic on the beach may form part of an all encompassing techno-system that regulates our new world. But eventually we will create a world so complex we can no longer control it and we'll have to entrust it to something else. And in a techno-system, a resource draining and dependant creature like man would rapidly become the weakest link.

As the human race is not one society, but many competing societies, the chances of any meaningful co-operation is going to be slim. We're animals, so anything that gives us a competitive advantage over others is always going to remain a tempting option. However our strength has always been our ability to think and communicate ideas. And if we can change our perspective and start to think of ways to deal with our problems before we create them, instead of just putting spy-chips on wheely bins to tell us the bad news when it's too late, then perhaps we have a chance after all.