We should let people rummage in dumps.

I don't know about dumps as in giant piles of stench and germ filled uggy poo, like I saw they have in Lagos, but a lot of waste management places in the US do seem to have a salvaging aspect, or so I think. That probably varies.

I hope that this is a joke thread. If it's a sincere proposal, take a serious look at the recent Oscar nominated documentary Waste Land (2010).
http://www.wastelandmovie.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/

Life for the people rummaging in the dumps is living hell.

I've seen plenty of appliances that might have another go of it, especially where there's a set aside for metals.

My city nominally has recycling programs for electronics, for instance, but an employee at drop site told me most of it ends up in the landfill anyway. May or may not be true, but even if it's not it'd certainly be more efficient to turn a broken microwave into a working microwave than into a bunch of scrap components to be melted down and turned into a new microwave. Or whatever.

Or not. I dunno. Was just thinking about my grandma picking up coal of the railroad tracks as a kid and all the stuff we throw away that she never had to have.

Yeah.

Aidan has posted about the guy at her waste facility saving stuff for her - although she was talking about the refinishing furniture level.

Not all that long ago, back in Venice/Santa Monica, there were one or two or more fixit shops, where some codger got whatever it was of your small appliances going again, oh, and also sharpened knives and scissors. Somewhere along the line, most people got into tossing, I suppose for the obvious reason that it is just about as cheap to buy a new thingy.

Thanks, Steve, I'll take a gander at that. I don't know if it's a sincere proposal or not, was just a thought.

When I'm told by an appliance repairman that I'm better off buying a whole new applicance than replacing a compressor, though, I figure something must be amiss with the system. My repaired dump compressor might have passed through the hands of someone lives like ****, but so does my store-bought dehumidifier. How to calculate the balance?

This is part of what disturbs me. And I'm part of it, make no doubt.

Also, those small nooks the codgers used as their shops started rising fast in real estate value, at least in our old area. Probably a similar thing with shoe repair shops, which is too bad for sure.

You're a Swiftian pup, aren't you?

People in lots of places live on garbage dumps.....and it was a big trade in Dickens' London

Here, we tend to put furniture and appliances out on the footpaths for collection. Usually the scavengers get to it before the paid collectors do.

Oh, no doubt, we've got a lot of local scavenging. Every August 15 is move-in day for probably 10,000 or so undergrads. The most busted furniture in the world ends up in somebody's leaking, drafty student rental. (I know, I've lived in a few of them. The cold tears through the windows in these places, which can be offset by big drunk gatherings.) Still, though, the kids have no use for appliances, and if there's been a lot of renovation -- and there's a ton here -- there are bound to be literally tons of serviceable appliances sitting out in the dirt, rusting, providing dens for the rodent folk. When I dumped my plaster walls I saw a couple of things I would have taken with me a decade ago. And that was just at the spot where I backed up my truck.

On another forum I visit several of the dumpster divers in "frugal" were discussing their college move out hauls. One guy had photos of what was probably 6 months worth of food and drink. It seems that when college kids move out of the dorm that they throw everything away.

In Portland they will come pick up your old appliances and pay you for the privilege. Recycling here is a big deal. I could go on and on. Yay Portland.

It's a shame that things aren't made in a way that makes having them repaired a reasonable option.

The other day I saw blackout "privacy" trash bags at the store for the first time. I'm still wondering about that.

Sorry this is so disjointed but I wanted to be able to find it easily tomorrow and I'm really tired tonight.

I think cobblers are pretty much gone, osso. I figure I'll have trouble getting my beloved broken-in steel-toes resoled.

Maybe another viewpoint, perhaps related.

When the Indians lived here -- the American Indians, you understand, as they came to be called -- they managed the forests. Land was given to agriculture. Some of it. But they also managed North America's forests to improve their lives.

They set fires to burn out the underbrush, making more room for forests to grow and spread.


And for game to travel. As grassland recolonized the dense undergrowth, small game would have flourished out in the open, where they were eaiser to collect. And deer and bison would be attracted to the new growth, and could also be taken. Moreover, by managing the edges of the forests relative to their cities -- and there were cities, complete with all the social evils and boons the city-state affored, before the Spanish edged up the Mississippi, with livestock and pestilence.

Keeping animals always at arm's length but also within arm's length may have been a different approach from the Eurasian keeping of cattle, but it definitely was an approach, not an accident.


It was not a case of leaving things alone and taking what's made available. They had a different way of managing resources from what has followed. Not a mystical view, per se. Though certainly we can make idols of the processes that benefit us, like so many web page banners, whether we mean to or not.

We may do ourselves a disservice by ignoring ideas that might seem foreign.




Though I suppose if the scavenging idea actually has legs, it will be an industry with bosses, just like anything else.

I don't think disjointed is the most useless way to be, from time to time.

I'm sorry, but this is such obvious tripe that i can't just let it go in silence. To suggest that the Amerindians were consciously "managing" the forests is nonsense. They were seeking their own advantage in burning off the underbrush; and that's not all they did, they banded trees as well, to clear land for their fields. The "old growth" forests which white settlers found in the early 19th century were actually, in many cases, forests which had grown up after disease or inter-tribal warfare had removed the previous tenants. The burning off of undergrowth and the banding of trees produced what is known as sylvan park land. How can you reasonably say that the environment was improved? Were the plant and animal species one can associate with an old growth forest somehow less worthy than those which prospered in the sylvan park land environment?

To me, that all stinks of the self-serving propaganda of the type which became popular after the establishment of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s (late 1960s?). Were tribes or bands who did not practice slash and burn agriculture somehow less worthy than those that did? Is this not exactly the sort of attitude that people decry in their condemnation of the European settlers? If the Amerindians were so damned environmentally attuned, what happened to the megafauna after they arrived? Why did animal species diversity take a nose-dive in the Americas just as it did at the end of the "ice age" everywhere else if the Amerindians were so environmentally attuned?

Some of my fond childhood memories involve rummaging through a dump or two. In those days, bulldozers were not as busily churning it up, as they are these days. Or perhaps they were too poor to buy bulldozers where I went. I never found anything really great, however. The man in charge once told me that I need to turn over any money I found to him. I promised I would. Yeah, right.

I didn't intend to, at least from any objective standpoint, just that it was managed differently. And I think I still would say that it was managed -- to control the extent and character of various ecosystens, to whatever end, would seem to me to fit the bill as "management."



No, I certainly wouldn't say that. What interests me more is the difference between using forested land as an ongoing source of food rather than as a one-time (or perhaps once every few decades) source of fuel and building material.



Would you hold modern Eurasians responsible for the extinction of Bos taurus in the wild? These events were millennia apart. People change in that time. If I was being romantic, I might even turn that around and suggest that somehow the after-effects of that catastrophic mismanagement might have led to more conscious practices down the road. I doubt that's actually the case, but I don't think it's any less a tenable presumption than that there should philosophical stasis between the retreat of the last glacial maximum the and more or less present day.

As for the "so environmentally attuned" bit, I don't have an image of the Amerindian as a shamanic Steward of the Wild Lands. Reportedly, Indian guides on the Lewis and Clark expedition would set fire to sap-filled pine trees and watch them explode like Roman candles just for the sake of amusement. It is what it is. At the same time, many groups did employ some land use strategies that were likely more sustainable, in their time and place, than many practices in use around the globe today, and I don't think it's folly to at least consider them as models for different approaches we could use today. (I'm cribbing relentlessly from 1491 here, if you want attribution. I'm certainly no scholar in the area.)

I see no reason to assume that the Amerindians were consciously attempting to control the extent of any ecosystem. They were slashing and burning undergrowth and banding trees to provide fields, and then moving on when the soil was exhanusted. I think you are projecting modern attitudes on the past when you speak of management. I have no reason to assume the Amerindians knew that they were or consciously set out to creat sylvan park lands.

I see no reason for your claim that Amerindians were using the forest as an ongoing source of food. Swidden farming (usually loosely referred to as slash and burn) has no reference to game populations. It's not unreasonable to point out that the destrruction of the understory exposed much small game, but i'd suspect that small predators--raptors, foxes, stoats and weasels--were the likely immediate beneficiaries. The evidence from historical times is that when the soil was exhausted as agricultural land, the tribe or band moved on. I know of no reason to assume that the Amerindians has some "holistic" view of an ecosystem which they would exploit in many ways by the use of tree-banding and burning the understory.

I haven't suggested that there should have been "stasis" from the time of the glacial retreat until the present. I'm just pointing out that Amerindians do not appear to have been any better as stewards of the forest and the game than has been the case with any other people. There are deadfalls which Amerindians were known to use in historical times (i've seen one which is basically the remnants of low stone walls between which the Indians would drive game herds to the edge of a cliff). I see no evidence that they learned much from their encounters with the environment. Whether in Euope thousands of years ago, or in North America, people just didn't live long enough to distill such lessons. When the last aurochs was killed (ostensibly in Poland in the 17th century), there were records which made the event noteworthy. But when the last short-faced bear was killed or died off, was anyone alive who remembered when they roamed the forest in larger numbers than black bears or brown bears? When the last giant sloth was killed or died off, was there anyone around who remembered when they were found in almost every large tree? For an illiterate people to learn such lessons, there has to have been a consciously maintained memory repository. If any such thing existed, we have no record of it surviving into historical times. There is plenty of evidence that the Indians had extenstive oral traditions, but i know of none which concerned themselves with "ecosystem management." I seriously doubt if there was any significant difference between my ancestors 9000 years ago and the Amerindians of 9000 years ago. Not long after that, though, copper smelting began, and the entire equation of comparison was permanently wrecked.

Interesting discussion on the slash and burn, management or not, discussion. I'm only aware of California's fire ecology - which I assume is related to other fire areas - and know that only to the extent I studied it and was tuned to it in my job once. So, last I knew, in nature, sans human interference, a full blown fire would burn to the "line" it had burned the last time. At least that was one expert's lecture I took to heart. Now matters are complicated by valued housing in or near the woods and wilds so that fire companies rush to put the fires out, creating bigger ready-to-burn areas, some part with increased understory fuel, for next time.

Re dumps, conservation of resources, in one's apartment or a whole city or the environment makes sense to me, but then there is the problem of the economy wanting to be fed by the ever new production of goods.

By the way, PPD, i'm not trying to beat up on you. As far as the general scheme of things goes in this thread, i do think there is a growing problem. Twenty years ago, if your computer broke down, you took it in to be repaired. Although it is true that they usually just identified the defective component and replaced it, things have changed drastically. Now, if your computer breaks down, they just replace the entire unit. I heard the head of a physical plant at the company where i was employed complaining about 20 years ago that the guys he employed didn't know how the devices they serviced worked. He said they'd replace a part, and if it still didn't work, they'd replace the next part, and if it still didn't work, they'd replace the next part--etc., etc., etc. It is both easier from the warrantor's point of view, and from the point of view of customer convenience, just to junk the old unit and issue a new one.