No Land Ethic, No Country

No land ethic, no country. Is there more plastic debris spread upon the American Landscapes than stars in the sky?

The spread of litter and trash may have reached the point of no return, as far as we as a people in our ability to ever retrieve it back from its stain upon our nation making the United States one of the dirtiest places in the world. This ever-present evidence shows clearly our "loss of a land ethic".

Two aspects of our consumer society are guilty of this behavior, individual and corporate. Convenience has taken over as a social force of degeneration. Convenient fast products sold in mass quantities to individuals by corporations who promote and manufacture these products in a free market.

Convenience needs to be defined as absent or free from responsibility; for example a corporation say; Coke or Pepsi or any giant plastic producing enterprise makes products for the open market, this market operates and causing an effect; pollution, litter trash in amounts so great one cannot escape the eye-sores and offense that stands before us, so what do corporations do as a direct result of their products impacts? Nothing.

Buying their products makes you responsible and depending on who you are you either are or not; however the result is mass pollution of which only the corporation can be held responsible for, but they are not. No sense of social responsibility is forthcoming, when it should be and rightly so from the corporations whom make the product that pollutes.

Corporations should have already on their own voluntarily initiated a workforce that receives payment for cleaning and encouraging proper social attitudes and actions to keep the Nation clean and free as possible from their products waste. For example; helping National Parks our Nations' gems, stay clean through a litter abatement labor force. (National Park Service has suffered much from recent budget cuts; while corporations receive more and more tax breaks).

This responsibility is passed off to the public through feeble re-cycling and clean communities programs which in reality do little to combat this corporate phenomena. The real thing is we believe America is beautiful and ignore deny what has happened to our land and people. Is not the "loss of a land ethic" a form of mental illness a systemic result of mass production of convenience that actually encourages this negative impact and denying it at the same time.

If there was truly a love of our country, call it patriotism our landscapes would be clean, or there would be an uproar by Congress to stop the irresponsible ignoring of what has happened to our country.

Corporations have the money and our economy is controlled by them, there model serves them not the people; from the spread of sprawl development and shopping malls to the never ending result of the trash this way of life leaves behind it shows the difference between a real nation and a land lost to its own freedom and lack of responsibility. One Nation Under God.

We are a nation divided by greed and an economic system that has outlived its purpose and meaning. No land ethic no nation. Freedom is a farce and its dynamic only suits the selfish the more money one has the more one wants, this too is a mental illness. America needs to clean its house, literally and corporations responsible.

Nick Homyak
Lake Hiawatha