Ok, the idea of taking a walk and picking up roadside trash and then arranging it on the ground for a picture is strange. Well, maybe not the picking it up part, but the portrait arrangement is a bit off. Yet, a few things struck me as I picked up these discards. All of them are fast food, junk food, or quick food items. In all the trash I've ever fished out from various roadsides, not once have a seen an empty bag of carrots, a milk jug, a spent tea bag, or an empty cashew container. Never has there been anything that once packaged something healthy. It seems that the vast majority of trash is the stuff that has negative impact on the body, similarly our roadsides and planet. Correlation or coincidence?

So, we have to ask ourselves - at least, for roadside trash - is the problem with disregard for Earth that we just don't really care about ourselves? On the surface, we can say that it is a disregard for others who do care about the beauty that lay at our feet. True. Yet, given the items disgarded, there is clearly a pattern of consumption of food trash where the packagings often become roadside trash. Maybe, we need to see these trashing culprits less so from a standpoint of "you're spoiling my beauty" to "you are spoiling yourself." Possibly, the lessons we need to begin teaching are basic care-for-the-self ones. I mean, if someone truly cared about herself, she would think to eat differently and the impact would be felt and seen in our surroundings.

And it is a much more involved and interesting discussion, but this whole argument may have impact on a larger and global scale, not just one of roadside trash. Over consumption is killing us, and we are addicted to it. We relish consumption of fossil fuels and things in general - which are usually produced and/or discarded in direct connection to carbon conssumption. What drives that need to have more, go more places, seek more things? Is there something naturally built in us to acquire? Just human nature?

Well, maybe.

Yet, it's an aspect of human nature I think we need to work against. Bottom-line, there is unhappines, lack of self-care and understanding, and contentment. Somehow, this is fuel for the spirit of consumption. Consumption will not work to bring us what we need, but like a drug, we think it will and seek more. Seeking more and more is the same for our soul as is junkfood for the body, yet it has an even greater impact on our planet. However, if true contentment were acquired - and this be our driving force - the global meltdown we are creating would be history. With true contentment, would we really need that new fridge, the latest computer or bigger and better home? Or, would we sit satisfied with what we have?

Really, all of these things we replace and purchase, purchase, purchase become a type of roadside trash. For those of us who don't throw the Kit-Kat wrapper out the window, all we acquire ends up somewhere. We just don't see it. (For some images of this global impact of our consumption search Google Images under manufactured landscapes.)