A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?

A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that?

What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore.

That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for cheapest output. Extract value by consuming as quickly as possible. Discard remnants immediately. Ignore whatever value may remain. Extract fake value by landfilling. Lose all potential regenerative value forever. Pretend extractive systems are unrelated to climate change, inequality, and depression. Repeat.

take. take. take + make. make. make + toss. toss. toss=concentrated power in the hands of a few at the expense of us all.

Where is the regeneration? How does this cycle nourish our culture? Our planet? Our humanity? What part of this system makes you feel alive? seen? heard? safe? creative? joyful?

Though we’re all in this juggernaut together, we are not all on the extraction dance floor waving our hands like we just don’t care. I challenge us to find out who is.

Hint: we likely won’t find communities, artists, farmers, teachers, small businesses, domestic or overseas labor, future generations, the climate, the ocean, or the rainforest.