There are two healthy red panda pups in my nearby Prospect Park zoo. And I have seen the rare urban raccoon wondering my Brooklyn neighborhood at dusk and early dawn. Never at time and distance where I could photograph with my measly phone.
What was once sparingly doled out when the weather turned cool and the leaves started to change is now dumped on consumers by the truckload before the Summer even comes to a close. We’re talking about pumpkin spice, but we can’t decide if this jack-o’-lantern that farts the over-powering scent is an homage to the Fall tradition... or a critique of it.
The U.S. produces lots of pumpkins each year — more than 2 billion in 2020 alone. But that year, only one fifth were used for food, which means Americans are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the gourds annually, just to toss them in the trash when Halloween ends.
So they end up in landfills, which were designed to store material — not allow them to break down. The lack of oxygen in landfills means organic matter like pumpkins produce methane gas, a greenhouse gas that's harmful for the climate.
