Trash Land

Manifestations of the Cluttered Mind

(Apologies if you’ve received this week’s article twice – my mistake )

Unfortunately many roadsides throughout the Scottish countryside are littered with the gaudy decorations of plastic bags, takeaway food cartons, cups and cans. Silvery sides of sweetie wrappers rippling amongst the winter grey grasses. Mauls of filthy rags mashed among the roadkill, plastic bags and castaway vapes. These are the throwaway libations of the careless mind – a consumer generation lost in the thrall of their air conditioned boxes, with their surround sound plug-in; remote and cut off from the vibrancy of the world that they whisk through.

Out here, in the Galloway Hills, I find these scattered pennants of plastic wrappers and cartons on silent forestry tracks, tossed from the cabs of forestry wagons. Their drivers don’t seem to care. Perhaps each token marks the victory of a selfish rebellion, their little not-giving-a-fuck moment. I try to put myself in this mindset. Sitting up high in the cabin, arm resting on the windowsill, polystyrene carton full of cooling chips and rather than put that in the bin later on, just let it go when it’s done with. There is a certain kind of mentality at work here. We really need to turn this around. There’s something spiteful about it, something stupid and self-effacing.

I find littering a strange one. It’s something I’ve never done. It’s an alien action to me. I fail to grasp it because, surely, whatever politics we may hold, whatever lack of regard, when you boil everything down we share the same planet. If anything, when I’m out and see it, I pick it up and pop it in my bag to dispose of later.

Perhaps these are the manifestations of the cluttered modern mind: folded into narrow perspectives, cornered by the rigours of the petty dramas of life. Unable to step back, view the whole and de-clutter; the mind barely notices as it lets the cup fall to the verge. Could it be that the fault lies in an ignorant disregard for the world ‘out there’? Or is it something else, and that there actually isn’t such a thing as a meaningless act? You see, I have a suspicion that a lot of the littering marring the country’s verges is partly down to political contempt. It’s a contempt for what is perceived as an enemy – a sort of misdirected spitefulness. It’s aimed at a ‘them’ and which ever face they pin to that ‘them’ – the face of the school teacher telling them what to do, or the boss at work, their wife, or the politician they mistrust. The countryside is the receiver that cannot scream back.

Like most things, there’s never just a single easy answer. Things are more complex in reality, because reality mirrors nature. How could it not? Other factors are surely at play. Perhaps this aforementioned underlay of resentment is enhanced by corporately financed misinformation, which promotes such ideas like ‘climate change being a hoax dreamed up by liberal elites’ – despite what we see happening in real-time across the globe. In Scotland we have long noticed a distinct lessening of snowfall, and how many old curling ponds are used like they once were? Curling lochs, named on maps, bear testament to colder winters when this game was played outdoors upon the ice.

I suspect that if you traced these original conspiratorial memes back to their source, and looked at who supported them, you’d find Petrol Chemical companies or their affiliate associations. Let’s face it, who does climate-change denial serve? Obviously those that benefit are those who plough up the earth and drill for its life’s blood. Those who pollute and are allowed to do so via networks of corruption. Fearful of the shifting balance away from oil and petrol that ecological concern brings about, their CEOs react. Conspiracies are formed and fleshed out, seeping through the internet’s drains like a rancid pollutant.

Neither is it a coincidence that many of these ideas are lapped up by the Right Wing. Fascism was always enthusiastic about corporate power, and never truly about people or individuals (apart from their leaders, of course). In the early decades of the 20^th century, it shouldn’t surprise us that some of those who envisioned a bright technological future, with the motor car and rocket as their emblems, were fascist sympathisers. People such as Filippo Marinetti, an intellectual poet who was at the forefront of the Italian Futurist movement. Amongst the edicts of his Futurist manifesto comes the merciless voice of industrial progress:

“We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman,” and “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”

The tone of this technological vision is laden with the piston crunch of the intellectual poets who conceived the idea.

“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

The vision summons to mind JRR Tolkien’s vision of Mordor, and the orcs ravaging the countryside to carry out Sauron’s demands. Of course, Marinetti’s ideas were absorbed into the corpus of fascist ideology. Germany and Italy embraced this industrial schema and the lust for perpetual war. They embraced the poetry of ‘might is right’ and faceless worker bees slaving in factories. Some of you might recognise these trends in modern society as we live it.

But let’s pull back from the politics, back to the fact that we all share this planet. Surely it benefits us all to look after our Earth? I believe that pagan and animist concepts can only benefit society, because a deep rooted respect of the land is integral to pagan ideals. To harm the earth only serves to harm ourselves. We see this time after time. Pagans know this; we read it in myths and feel it communed to us amongst the wild.

As for littering, whether it be a manifestation of systemic ignorance, or unconscious (anti-)political malice, we need to find ways to deal with it. Local councils across the land have had their budgets slashed since austerity. Where councils fail, civilians step up. Instead of moaning about the state of affairs,* some do something. In Dumfries, concerned locals set out every weekend filling green bags with litter from roadsides and beaches, stacking them for the council to collect. And they persist, despite the seemingly never ending flow of ignorance. Groups like Eco Warriors set a precedent. We can no longer totally rely on the mechanism of councils to get things done. We need to organise and to do these things ourselves. Litter picking can be a social and (for pagans) a spiritual event. Perhaps it is also an act of rebellion to counter the careless mindset of a culture in decline.

Dumfries Eco Warriors - a good example

*There’s part of me feels that this whole article is one big moan – but it needed to come out.