The Future’s Not What
It Used Be

When I was a kid, everyone I knew had a fascination for the future. After putting a couple of men on the moon, it seemed like the future held a lot of promise (space travel) and peril (pollution, nuclear war) for my particular generation. In school we were always discussing the future in science and social studies classes, counting down the days until the entire United States adopted the metric system.

We even had best-selling books like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock that tried to peer into the keyhole of tomorrow to better prepare ourselves as human beings for the future.

This debris covered bank of Winkler’s Creek in Boone can be seen from the Greenway Trail. Much of it is caused by wind blowing trash out of restaurant dumpsters. Photo by Jeff Eason

On the weekends, my friends and I would go to the movies and watch serious films about the future such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and Soylent Green. These were not childish space fantasies like Star Wars. These were deep dissertations (for us, anyway) on what lie ahead for mankind…made with a lot more imagination than special effects.

Of course, not everybody agreed on what that future was going to be like. In fact there were often contradictory predictions at play.

For example, one camp of prognosticators stated that the world would manage to find the secret to everlasting peace. The other camp predicted a desolate planet smoldering in the radioactive afterglow of World War III.

One group believed in the power of science and technology to solve all our energy needs. Soon, they said, we will be driving cars that will get more than a hundred miles per gallon (I’m not sure what that equals in kilometers per liter). That’s just before we harness the power of nuclear fission and invent cars—or even personal rocket ships—that run on tap water!

Others predicted that we would run out of petroleum altogether and return to a wood-burning, horse and buggy society. They urged everybody to secure their forty acres and a mule before technology crashed and burned in our faces.

I distinctly remember having discussions in my science classes about how the planet was to survive if we kept on using our natural resources at breakneck speed. We envisioned a future where forests were mowed down to make room for landfills as far as the eye could see. A world where the entire Grand Canyon was filled to the brim with disposable diapers.

It was not a pretty picture, but at least we were thinking about it.

These days, I’m afraid, we’ve lapsed into a hedonistic live-for-today attitude. Every other car on the highway is a gas-guzzling behemoth and no one seems to mind that just about everything we purchase is encased in layers of childproof non-biodegradable plastic. We’ve got prisoners in orange jumpsuits to pick up the trash that we throw out of our cars, so we don’t even bother picking up after ourselves.

Gas prices reached an all-time high last summer but barely made a dent in our consumption. We are at odds with just about every petroleum-producing country in the world but it doesn’t seem to make anyone want to stop being OPEC’s most reliable customer. Even television images of giant glaciers of ice melting and crashing into our polar oceans are not enough to make us stop producing greenhouse gases at a record pace.

Perhaps when the winters become so warm that the High Country cannot support four ski resorts will people in our area give a hoot about global warming. This past winter was one of the warmest on record but featured many days and nights of record-breaking winds. I don’t know if that is a result of global warming or just an aberration that would have happened naturally.

What I do know is that all of that wind blew trash out of back of pickup trucks, off of porches and away from construction sites. If you’ve taken a good look at our High Country roadsides lately (as writer Bill Kaiser mentioned last week), you know that they are filled with this wind-strewn garbage. It really looks like we’ve been invaded by a mad swarm of litterbugs.

Hopefully we can get our act together and re-beautify our mountain roadsides before the tourists arrive this summer. If not, there’s going to come a time in the future where no one wants to come up here at all.

That’s my prediction.

So, join me this weekend as I get out my garbage bag and engage in some outdoor spring cleaning by picking up a couple of pounds of debris from around roadsides in the High Country. If you like, you can weigh yours futuristically…in kilograms.