Mr. Snyder and the Garbage Tax

For most westerners, weekly garbage collections are probably just a simple fact of life—the way the world works. It’s hard to imagine living without the ease and convenience of the standard arrangement, by which someone simply drags away everything you no longer want on a regular basis, no questions asked. But less than 100 years ago, it was hard to imagine living with such an arrangement, at least for some people. Witness a heated debate that raged in the Palo Alto newspaper in 1915 over the issue of mandatory collections.      More

 

Soylent Green – Imagining Climate Change

It’s 2022. The earth has been completely degraded and overpopulated. Society is given over to class warfare and corruption all around. All that’s left is grimy city, masses of filthy humans, and acres of burned-out cars. Not a blade of grass remains and no one except the oldest citizens even remembers the taste of strawberries or the sight of tulips waggling their heads in the breeze. Naturally, farming is a thing of the past, and it appears that the vast preponderance of food production is a matter of recycling organic matter—including humans.           More