trash and tech

The response to the letter telling me I'd be fined $2,500 if I didn't clean my yard.
yipes.

Dear Ms. Landers,

I remember as a little girl about a mile from here a fastidious neighbor who cleaned her garbage pail and dumped the dirty water in the sewer weekly. She was told by the city to stop or be fined. We were all mostly amazed or appalled. Who objected?
I'm the beighbor who cleans trash frrom the streets every day. I'm the neighbor who sweeps up the broken glass from the street. I'm also the neighbor who has an unruly and yet gorgeous yard attracting both btterflies and hummingbirds in the summer. In this ard I grow: Mexican sunflowers, Russian sunflowers, all kinds of sunflowers, cannas, cosmos, peaches, plums, raspberries, black raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, peppermint, lemon mint, catnip, chocolate mint, pineapple mint, sage, lavender, roses, roses, roses, roses, curly willow and puss willow, calendula, butterfly weed, garlic, primrose, echinecea, and the occasional burdock... as well as a Kentucky coffee tree and catalpa.
Many of these are known as volunteers, Mother Nature is incredibly generous and bountiful when we leave her alone or help her along here in the fertile Midwest which 'progress' sees fit to cover with a city's asphalt.
The very first piece of trash I noted in the yard when I moved in was an nnounceent to Tech High School students regarding complaints from the neighborhood about students trash. That's appropriate for a floundering school system... give the students another piece of trash. Sadly, there are 'dumpsters' only fifty feet away in most instances. Very little notion of using them and keeping our streets clean. I've found unopened bottles of beer in my yard. I don't drink beer.
Unless you are over forty, I imagine you think coke hasalways come in cans. Most of the trash blowing in the wind wasn't even invented twenty or thirty years ago. Plastic jugs were unknown, plastic bags unthought of, styrofoam isjust bizarre junk. Throw-away diapers? A nation of consumers. Just tody with the wind blowing heavily, I cleaned up the side of the house three times. This lifestyle cannot continue. This lifestyle will not continue. What are we leaving to and for our children?
Read Studs Turkel's WORKING, one of the folks he profiles is a gargagemen from Chicago who states that in '53 he picked up the garbage for 70+ streets weekly, and by the early seventies he was picking up under twenty streets a week because of packaging. (Let alone the jobs lost due to replacing store clerks with
pre-packaged items.) Dear Ms. Landers, it's gotten worse.
In the fifties a 'junk man' cam down the alley in ahorse drawn cart once a week to pick up newspapers, rags, cans, glass; he made a living. My mother threw out onehalf can of trash a week. My mother had four children. I am a single person and throw out more than that each day! I throw it into a 'dumpster' that challenges my imagination as a homeeconomist. Somebody made a lot of money selling a jerk scheme to the city.
When our mayor was elected I wrote asking this be looked into and reconsidered. I pictured his little mother walking through my muddy alley, lifting the heavy lid on the dumpster and depositing her trash. White trash neighborhood. These people are not stupid; most want to do their part. Most would sort the trash.
I suggested some kind of recycling effort instead of this wasteful dumpster situation where people come into the neighborhood from around the county to dump their shingles, tires, tree triming, etc. This is not small scale. Soemtimes trucks loaded down come into the alley filling each dumpster in turn. The Mayor's office never acknoedged nor responded to my letter.
Perhaps you could write a grant proposal whereby you could get a trip to Santa Rosa, California, or Portland, Oregon where I know they had intelligent working recycling/trash programs. When I first began researching these problems twelve years ago with the birht of th eToxic Action Proect I learned Milan, Italy had program in effect which removed the old egg shell for use. Now that's a trip worth going after.
Indianapolis is joked about for 'things and ideas' getting to us 25-100 years after the rest of the country. I don't know we have that long to get wise. I don't know about your job and what you can do to clean up the city when we have a city counsel led by a man whose lifestyle 99% of us couldn't touch if we won the lottery.
I have an across the alley neighbor who suggested I leave the back door open and he'd come over and 'help me out' early some morning, grabbed my breasts, and told me not to call him when his wife was home, and was the door before I could gather my wits. So excuse me if I prefer to create a natural burdock barrier between that door and the alley.
Welcome, come take another look at the yard. I will not cut down my raspberries or rose of Sharon or sage or wild clematis. I will leave the milkweed as food for the monarch butterly farvae which once migrated through here using Brookside Park... they stopped at one Tulip tree that has since been cut... I havne't seen them migrate from decades now.
I hope our species is willing to adapt to the changes that are the only thing I am sure of. Things change; if not today, tomorrow. I pray the changes are humane, generous, peaceful, intelligent and joyful and full of soul redemption.
Sincerely.