City Entitlement

There are many things that I don’t talk about much on this journal, or maybe things that I have just not mentioned. I mostly write out my thoughts, what is currently going on in my life etc. There are some thoughts that I just don’t share. Or things that I normally do that I just don’t mention. There are parts of us that we find inherent, and sometimes other people don’t realize it about us. It is no one’s fault just the way it is. But lately I have been racking my brain about the system of the US and the world. I am in food science, as most of you know. But I also come from the Reduce Reuse Recycle campaign of long ago. I guess it stuck in my mind because lately I have been stumbling over it in my brain. As I look around in the world I look at the amount of consumption and the mentality of consumerism. It eats away at me to think that every single thing that is thrown away is a material that took energy, time, and money to make, not to mention resources, and it is going to stay in a landfill never to be used again, never to be of any help ever again. Some of the things that we toss are degraded back into soil but it is still useless because of all of the toxins that are leached into the soil surrounding the things that will not degrade, or will take thousands if not millions of years. Thinking this way can drive me crazy thinking about the millions of tons of trash that is in produced every day. Packaging and plastic bags drive me nuts! It would be interesting to see if it is possible to find the amount of paper that could be saved if packaging were reduced, or if all packaging and packing materials could be recycled.


I drove throughout some of the Omaha area. This city is much larger than many people realize. Everyone I told that I was moving out here always remarked something along the lines of, “What’s out there?” Well it is, actually, very developed and very large. I drove west past my apartment complex for the first time, and there were large areas of housing development with those huge houses with vaulted ceilings, rather overbuilt for my taste. In other words it is huge “Urban Sprawl”, really. The city is encroaching on all the land that used to surround it. What of the land that is lost? What of the people that are now filling those plots? How are they to be sustained?

I found myself wondering if we can ever sustain cities with only the farmland that surrounds them?

I did finally get to some land cleared for farmland, but this is the Midwest, the Corn Belt. As the areas are currently plowed I cannot tell you what the crop will be, but in all best guessing it is most likely to be corn and if not corn than more than likely soybeans. And let me remind you this is the Midwest. There are many, many months of the year when things aren’t being grown. In pilgrim days people would have to have cold storage and life off tubers, root veggies, and whatever apples they could store. But today the majority of our food is trucked in from other states if not other countries so we can have what ever we want whenever we want it. Not only is there demand for things that that aren’t in season, but there is great demand for things that simply cannot be grown in the region. Citrus fruits cannot be grown in the northern parts of the US; and I don’t believe we grow coffee or bananas.

Our way of life simply is not sustainable. The things we want, the amount of things we buy and keep buying. The waste that we produce. The land we trash, the water that we use and squander.
It is our nature to continually make our life’s easier. In doing so we have changed the worries of our lives, of our nation. Because we do not have to spend our time farming in order to survive we have created other professions and have created vehicles to make the world smaller.

But in doing so, we have created havoc on the earth. We have not prepared or innovated to protect what we live on. We have been so far removed from the planet from the earth we live on we do not give a second thought that everything we throw away in the trash is a material that will never be used again and will continue to stay on the planet in an un-useable state for eons to come. The population has boomed and grown at huge rates that we have not predicted. Countries are developing and using the US as a model, people in China all want cars like Americans. We have increased consumerism in our own country and in countries around us.

I don’t believe it takes a scientist to realize, to make the connections that we are getting to a point where we cannot continue to live like this.

It will take all of us to change this. It will take more than all of us to stop throwing away things that can be reused, and buying and throwing away things that can’t. It will take system changes. Changes in the way we build our homes, our cities. Changes in the way we grow our food, buy our food, and prepare our food. Changes in our expectations of life. We need to change the idea that it is our right to live like this and not preparing for the future. We need to change our feeling of entitlement and start feeling the urgency to preserve what we have not yet destroyed, and fix the damage that has already been done.