Lilka Areton, director of the Museum of International Propaganda, is seated at her desk hovering over an issue of Der Adler on a recent Friday afternoon in San Rafael. It’s a vintage issue of the German magazine that dates back to the World War II, and she’s visibly stunned at the juxtaposition of content.

As she thumbs through the pages, Areton expresses a kind of knowing astonishment at the magazine. It’s a recent acquisition for the museum, which opened three years ago as an extension of the student-exchange program she and her husband, Thomas Areton, run out of a nearby San Rafael office. Since then, they’ve been dealing with a fan base locally that really wishes they’d devote more time to bashing Donald Trump and his modern-day propaganda-by-Tweet machine.

Areton lets out a few clucks at the pages of the general interest German magazine, which vacillates between celebrations of Hitler’s era and more prosaic celebrations of Christmas in wartime Germany, articles about dance concerts, advertisements selling mundane bits of consumer product to the German people that stood by while Hitler rampaged across Europe.

There’s nothing in these pages, says Areton, that would indicate any of the horrific activities undertaken by the Nazis, no hint of the raging anti-Semitism that helped give rise to Hitler, no sign of any concentration camps for a European Jewry hideously victimized by the Nazis during the Holocaust. She sighs and closes the bound copy that contains several issues of the magazine.

A giant poster of Vladimir Lenin hangs behind the front desk at the museum. The place is itself chock-full of all sorts of engaging political agitprop from nations and regimes around the world, from North Korea to South Africa to Cuba to the Soviet Union. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is on full display, and local artist Patrick Gannon has contributed a painting called Guernica 2017 that’s an amazing reproduction of the famed Picasso painting that chronicled the destruction of the Basque by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War. The implication from Gannon is that nowadays the chief bomb-hurler in charge has his sights set on Guatemala if not Guernica.

The Pacific Sun last visited the museum in 2016 for a profile of the Aretons and their new endeavor in San Rafael. Three years later, they’ve got a popular weekly movie night on Wednesdays and they’ve added to their growing collection of international propaganda. But they’ve also had to deal with you-know-who.

A lot has happened in American politics since 2016, no? Namely, the elevation of Trump to the presidency of the United States. The Aretons have been engaged with the question of how to grapple with the Trump phenomenon, which arrived in this country with its own set of propaganda markers: The Make America Great Again hats. The Deplorables for Trump T-shirts. Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The plastic straws that read Trump in 2020.

If nothing else, future historians may interpret this era as the moment America fully capitulated to the politics of spectacle, thanks to a convergence of a Trump-struck media, the authoritarian strong-man himself, and the emergence of—indeed, the mass acceptance of governance-as-spectacle.

That style was mastered by Mao, repackaged on Trump’s behalf by Fox News and on full display last week in Congress as Republican defenders of Trump literally took the words right out of Sean Hannity’s mouth in their smear-questioning of Robert Mueller during hearings over
Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But visitors to the museum will find scant evidence that a master propagandist has seized the White House, and that’s by design. The museum, says Areton, has become something of a lightning rod for locals, a place for people to write their own politics on the walls of the museum, metaphorically speaking, to find a place where their political voice can be heard.

Some of them want the nonprofit to go full-throttle anti-Trump. Others, she says, won’t step foot inside because of the cast of characters on display here—Mao, Marx, Stalin.

“There’s a right-wing lady who won’t even come in,” says Areton, because the museum doesn’t offer any critical context or judgment to its intriguing displays from authoritarian regimes and elsewhere. This woman wants to know, says Areton, “Why aren’t you explaining how horrible Stalin was?”

Others come in, she says, and are furious about a piece of racist American WWII-era propaganda that highlights American attitudes toward their Japanese foes during the war: A poster depicts a Japanese soldier as a rat who is about to take the bait on a militarized rodent-trap atop a map of Alaska. The text readers: “Alaska: Death Trap for the Jap.”

But the mainline critique coming from locals is that the museum’s not taking on Trump, she says. The intensity and frequency of the complaint has caused some consternation for the Aretons, who opened their museum as a sort of adjunct to their long-standing student exchange business.

“There are people who come in here who hate Trump with so much vengeance,” she says, her voice tailing off for a moment. “We don’t know how to handle it, to tell you the truth.”

The Aretons, she says, have avoided the politics around Trump as they intersect with their need to run a business and offer a museum that’s fair to history and aims to highlight, simply, that there are many forms that propaganda can take. They are neither Democrat nor Republican, but libertarians, she says, and have stayed away from, for example, displays of religious propaganda. The museum is focused mostly on political figures and movements, and the question hanging in the air is how or if this Trump moment ends, and whether the –ism will outlive the man if he ever leaves office.

That issue, to say the least, has caused some great consternation among Americans savvy to the machinations of propaganda. Thomas Areton’s the executive director of Cultural Homestay International, the couple’s exchange-student program run out of a nearby office on West End Avenue in San Rafael.

He says in an email exchange about Trump and the museum that, given the anti-Trump sentiment that prevails in the county, he’d expect to find rocks hurled through the glass windows if they went all-in with a Trump propaganda exhibit. Even if it was neutral on the subject of Trump himself, much as the museum is neutral on the subject of Stalin, Mao and Hitler.

Soon after his ascension to the presidency, the museum hosted a show of anti-Trump art, which featured some art that’s still hanging in the museum—in the back of the museum. For that show, Gannon contributed an encaustic painting called “Fractured Flag” in response to Trump’s election.

The county’s general anti-Trump animus was on full display during that show, says Lilka Areton, which featured about 100 paintings speaking out in various ways against the rise of the authoritarianism in the United States. “We didn’t feel the need to have any pro-Trump art,” she says. But nestled in with the anti-Trump contributions from Gannon that remain at the museum, there’s a pro-Trump poster that reads “Defend American Freedom. ‘I Am Gonna Build That Wall.’

Lilka notes that the poster’s could be read as clever anti-Trump propaganda. It’s both ham-handed and sort of amateurish. “Even the pro-Trump propaganda comes off as anti-,” she says with a chuckle.

Areton is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and the child of a Marxist father who sent her to Russia when she was in her early 20s. She lived in Peru and worked with the Peace Corps; her family was persecuted during the McCarthy era and the experiences left Areton with a fierce libertarian streak that, she says, her husband eventually embraced. Thomas’ mother survived Auschwitz and lived in then-Czechoslovakia under Soviet control. The museum features a compelling side-by-side photo comparison from Slovakia taken before and after the Soviet occupation.

The latter scenes are far more welcoming in that they don’t contain any barbed wire–topped fencing and look like photos taken at a park. There’s also a snip of barbed wire from the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, to go along with a few posters of classic North Korean propaganda. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a photo of Trump meeting with his North Korean counterpart.

“We think [Trump] is appalling,” she says, “but we’re not part of the resistance.”

Areton says she could envision a possible show centered on this era, perhaps in five years, but that there’s no consensus between her and her husband about a Trump exhibit that highlighted the propaganda of this era. Indeed, it sounds like there’s some healthy debate going on between the couple about how, exactly, to grapple with Trump, if not Trumpism.

“But maybe someday,” she says.

There’s a question that hangs in the air while one takes in the posters and paintings and ephemera at the museum—the Gorbachev key chain, the Reagan bedroom slippers, the huge Guernica 2017 painting, the vibrant, politically charged posters all conspire to create a sense of kitsch met with a broader culture war that’s raging, if not in the streets then at least online.

The question is generally framed as “Do art and politics mix?” but here the answer is simple: Of course they do.

As Lilka Areton observes, the issue is how do they mix, and to what end. The question of this intersection of art and politics is all the more relevant today as trusted arbiters of propaganda and its devious agenda fall by the wayside, and as a president reaches the heights of spectacle through his dramaturgy by Tweet. Meanwhile, the legendary high-satirical Mad Magazine is in its death throes, the great sixties-era political satirist Paul Krassner has just died—and the Washington Post last week assigned their theater critic to review the “performances” of the various candidates running for the Democratic nomination this year. The paper that broke Watergate is now capitulating to the exact media-president problem embodied by Trump, so notch another victory for the triumph of spectacle. Maybe those Washington Post theater reviews of politics can be part of a future show at the Aretons’ museum, alongside some red MAGA hats.

In three refrigerated closets set to precisely 15, 18 and 21 degrees Celsius, Barry Sinervo is using several dozen salamanders assembled in small plastic tubs to predict the future.

On one metal shelf is a contingent of surreal-looking “Mexican walking fish” called axolotls—a nearly-vanished species from the Mexico City canals forged by the Aztecs. Other shelves hold endangered Santa Cruz long-toed salamanders and a black-and-red-spotted species native to the Sierra Nevadas.

“These are going extinct,” Sinervo says as he wrangles a lanky giant salamander. The cast of creatures changes often at the lab in UC Santa Cruz’s coastal biology building, but the goal stays the same.

“We gotta save them,” Sinervo says.

The focus on amphibians—in particular Sinervo’s first passion, lizards—may seem niche within the wide world of evolutionary biology, but scientists find them an excellent proxy for the physical and social changes climate change spurs in all kinds of species. Sinervo uses the data he gathered over three-plus decades of tracking extinctions and adaptations to hone universal formulas that may also predict extinctions for birds, fish and mammals.

“In a funny way, I’m the Nostradamus of biodiversity,” says Sinervo, a trained mathematician and herpetologist (a biologist specializing in reptiles and amphibians). “We can prove the sixth mass extinction is happening now.”

The affable 58-year-old, whose office door says “Dr. Lizardo,” has a remarkably sunny demeanor for someone who made a career out of predicting environmental catastrophes. He credits his upbringing in Ontario’s rugged Thunder Bay region with instilling an early appreciation for nature’s quirks. “I had iguanas as a kid, and I hunted snakes,” Sinervo says. “You know the mating balls that males end up in, where you get a male copulating a male? That was my sex education.”

Eccentric humor and northern humility lend Sinervo the ability to get away with things many academics can’t, like referencing his own TED Talk without sounding pretentious. In that 2015 talk, he recounted how around 2001 he first noticed European lizards disappearing from their usual habitats. He and his colleagues soon found similar extinctions all around the world, pointing to a new era of mass extinction with die-offs comparable to the last Ice Age. Except this time, it’s happening much faster.

“Biological annihilation,” or an “assault on the foundations of human civilisation” are how recent reports describe the current era of biodiversity loss, which some researchers call the “anthropocene.” Gerardo Ceballos, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, led a 2017 study that tracked habitat loss for 27,500 land-dwelling species. He told the Guardian, “The situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language.”

At their home on the Central Coast, Sinervo and his wife noticed species such as the northern alligator lizard—unique for giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs—disappear from their backyard. The same emissions-driven temperature increases causing habitats to go haywire also accelerate sea-level rise in coastal communities, which are beginning to grapple with how to protect billions of dollars worth of seaside real estate threatened by higher tides and more frequent extreme weather.

“We really have a train wreck coming,” says Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist and author who helped write recent state climate assessments with Sinervo. “Well, there are a couple train wrecks.”

From Santa Cruz to Big Sur; from the mountains of Central Mexico to the Amazon rainforest and the Kalahari desert; Sinervo now reliably predicts death and destruction everywhere he goes.

But he also has a secret which helps him avoid the cynicism and depression that might accompany his line of work: It gets easier after you come face to face with your own demise.

Heat Rising

Sinervo was aware of the conversation about climate change as far back as the late 1980s, while studying at the University of Washington. Back then, it was a theoretical conversation. If people didn’t take action to curb carbon emissions causing global temperatures to spike, the thinking at the time went, it was likely more species would start to disappear.

Sinervo’s frequent research collaborator Donald Miles, a fellow lizard expert and professor at Ohio University, remembers a “small but dedicated” group of ecologists and biologists sounding the alarm about climate change around the time he started working with Sinervo in 1993. Sinervo was always funny and enthusiastic, Miles remembers, but he was intense, working long hours and building a reputation as a prolific publisher in scientific journals.

Sinervo made a name for himself as a doctoral student and was hired by UCSC, after he discovered what he describes as a naturally occurring game of rock-paper-scissors near a research site in Los Banos. For male side-blotched lizards that come in three colors—orange, blue or yellow—he established that each group’s character traits keep the three populations in equilibrium. The orange lizards’ blatant aggression beats the smaller blue lizards, using brute force to win more mating partners. But the yellow lizards can trick the macho orange lizards by imitating females to sneak in and find more mates. Blue can still trump yellow, though, since they’re monogamous and thus more vigilant in protecting mating partners.

The “roshambo” research, as Sinervo calls it, was one of what would become many examples of how lizard evolution can shed light on an issue that confounds humans.

“A lot of people struggle with teaching gender,” Sinervo says. “With the lizards, you can kind of begin to grapple with all that. They’re not just male and female.”

In the process, Sinervo also established his street cred with fellow herpetologists.

“He’s a very proficient lizard capturer,” Miles says of Sinervo’s sharp eye and quick reflexes to lasso a lizard lurking in a crevice. “For every lizard I would catch, Barry would catch two.”

Even today, Sinervo has a cooler in his office marked “herps only,” with a no smoking sign through a drawing of an ice cream cone—a system his wife developed to distinguish coolers for transporting lizards and salamanders from coolers for transporting food.

By 2007, Sinervo and Miles had worked together enough that the UCSC professor sent a grad student with Miles to Mexico on a supposedly routine research trip. Following the directions of Mexican colleague Fausto Roberto Méndez de la Cruz, the duo headed to a reliable site east of Mexico City. But they couldn’t find the lizards there, nor in several surrounding areas. They called for reinforcements.

“There were five people looking for lizards, and we didn’t find any of the species,” Miles recalls. “Maybe it’s climate change,” he told Méndez de la Cruz.

In the following months, Sinervo made similar extinction discoveries in the Yucatán, and by 2010, a team of more than two-dozen researchers on several continents expanded the findings into a landmark article published in the journal Science under the title “Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches.” In layman’s terms, the researchers connected the dots between extinctions by proving climate change was the common link.

“Then we knew it was global,” Sinervo says. “Other people had published extinctions that seemed enigmatic, but we could explain them all around the world.”

Professionally, things were better than they’d ever been. Within a few years, hundreds of other researchers cited the paper, and Sinervo attracted new funding from groups like the National Science Foundation to train hundreds of graduate students in the field. In 2014, he received a $1.9 million grant from the University of California Office of the President to create an Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts.

The following year, Sinervo returned from a whirlwind 26-country tour of Europe, China, the Amazon and other hotbeds for extinction. As usual, the results were brutal. He struggled to process the constant bad news.

“Oh my god it was so depressing,” he says. “For several years I was thinking, ‘I’m leaving my son with nothing.’”

But today, in his office filled with reminders of doom, Sinervo’s attitude is different. And he pinpoints exactly what changed his mind.

“You know I’ve had cancer, right?” he says.

The Brink

Adenoid cystic carcinoma, or ACC, is a rare form of malignant tissue growth often found in salivary glands of the head and neck. Sinervo knew biology better than almost anyone, and the diagnosis was devastating. The cancer invaded his sinuses and soft palate, requiring a team of Stanford researchers to rebuild his throat.

Still, Sinervo was pragmatic. Not wanting to rack up carbon emissions driving to Stanford twice a week, he took the bus from Santa Cruz to a train in San Jose to another bus in Palo Alto, which took about four hours round trip. He still grew lettuce in his backyard for vegetarian meals and insisted he and his family reuse old iPhones. Over time, his perspective shifted.

“As I normalized my fight with cancer and realized maybe I’ll be able to overcome it, I did that in parallel with my fight against climate change,” Sinervo says.

The best way he can describe it is by comparing it to overcoming post-traumatic stress. Virtually everyone is likely to encounter cancer in some way—if not personally, then through someone they know.

“Everybody will be touched by it, and we do everything we can,” he says. “Climate change is like that. It will affect everybody on the planet personally.”

Sinervo points to examples such as mountainous areas of El Salvador and Guatemala being ravaged by drought and intense heat, making it impossible to grow food there, and contributing to the migration crisis on the southern U.S. border. And, California now experiences more frequent deadly wildfires fueled by hotter, drier conditions.

Sinervo’s heat maps show species like the desert tortoise currently living in the Mojave Desert moving toward the coast as temperatures rise, raising big questions about the future of the Central Coast’s famous agriculture industry.

Sinervo is also wading deeper into public policy discussions about reforestation, habitat preservation and other ways to potentially reverse the impacts of climate change. At the same time, his colleagues watching the shoreline warn it’s time to talk about a point of no return with regards to the erosion threatening coastal homes and infrastructure.

Griggs is part of a team of engineers, economists and geologists hired by the city of Santa Cruz to put together a plan for what to do about oceanfront West Cliff Drive and its recurring sinkholes. At the county level, a first-of-its kind coastal armoring program is being discussed to set new rules for building seawalls, which studies show will likely erode public beaches and impact surf breaks. The alternative is retreating from coastal property—a prospect that could require buyout programs or changes in how climate risk is priced into homeowner’s insurance.

“When do we pull the plug? It’s going to be different for the public infrastructure than private residences,” Griggs says. “Every decision that gets made is going to have a huge impact on all these other parts of the puzzle.”

In the process, Griggs says, it’s entirely possible scientists like Sinervo will find themselves at odds over habitat conservation with property owners inclined to dig in their heels and protect their homes or investments. That’s to be expected, Sinervo says.

“We will need government to impose all these things,“ he says. “This is not a moral call. Some people are just more selfish than others, and they won’t do it. Others will.”

“I work on the equations for why we behave the way we behave, and I understand it. It’s the way we evolved.”

Sinervo worked all the way up until his surgery at Stanford in 2017, when Miles was at the hospital with his wife, who is a psychotherapist. While Sinervo underwent radiation therapy, he began work on another paper.

“Barry is not the person who gives up,” Miles says.

New Normal

In January, Sinervo made it to the last destination on the worldwide extinction tour he started before his cancer diagnosis. The findings were brutal. Sinervo’s equation had successfully predicted a 60,000-square-mile extinction zone in the Kalahari desert in Southern Africa.

“That one’s mind-blowing,” he says, scrolling through heat maps on his laptop at UCSC. “This is scary shit. I get afraid sometimes of my own work.”

Sinervo is different now than he was before his battle with cancer. In his 2015 TED Talk, he came across as a quintessential dad-academic in khakis and a lime-green button up. He spoke in a measured tone, and occasionally peppered in PG-rated phrases like, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” This spring, he took it up a notch with a stand-up cameo in comedian Shane Mauss’ science-themed show at DNA’s Comedy Lab in downtown Santa Cruz.

“I’m going to try to inject a little levity into this. Not much,” Sinervo quipped in a voice that, post-surgery, has taken on a more nasally, slightly artificial quality. “We’re talking about a fucking mass extinction.”

His participation in Mauss’ show was part of Sinervo’s new focus on communicating what he’s learning to a wider audience, partly out of a desire to compel people to get serious about cutting red meat out of their diets, buying local and reducing consumption—specific ways to significantly reduce environmental impact—rather than to create vague hysteria about climate change. But the stand-up gig and efforts like the Twitter feed—where he often calls out his students (#SciencePadwans and #ScienceJedis)—are also logistical necessities.

“I can’t tweet about this fast enough, let alone write papers,” he says.

Sinervo’s curly brown hair is now gray, lending him a mad scientist vibe that’s amplified when he wears goggles to protect his left eye, which has remained closed since the surgery. It all fits when you walk into his small, second-floor office and see a series of incomprehensible equations scribbled on a white board—Sinervo’s working formulas to predict extinction anywhere in the world.

“I’m trying to make it as simple as possible,” he says of the horseshoes and commas and other symbols that denote variables like population growth and species interactions.

A natural teacher happy to explain any of his dozens of papers, there’s just one type of question that visibly irritates Sinervo, and that’s whether this issue can be dealt with, as many climate-change skeptics suggest, 20 years from now, or maybe 50? After 2100?

“It’s now. That’s what my work is showing,” Sinervo says. “It’s now. It’s now.”

The combination of Sinervo’s unique style and his research credentials have attracted a new generation of climate-conscious acolytes to the lab at UCSC.

“Barry is sort of like the climate change guru when it comes to lizards,” says Pauline Blaimont, a 28-year-old recent grad of UCSC’s evolutionary biology doctoral program. With Sinervo’s help, she spent several summers studying how lizards in the Pyrenees mountains are (or aren’t) adapting to hotter conditions.

Blaimont, from Southern California, has always been into animals. Lizards are perfect for studying climate change, she says, since they’re exothermic, regulating body temperature by directly basking in the sun. When it’s too hot, they spend more time in the shade—allowing less time to hunt insects—and see reduced levels of physical activity until they ultimately must migrate or face extinction. Since they’re low on the food chain, what happens to lizards also has ripple effects for the birds, snakes and mammals that eat them.

Like Sinervo, Blaimont says research has bled into her personal life. She and her partner do Meatless Mondays, and she’s distilled her advice to others into one directive: “Reduce, reuse, recycle, but in that order.”

Students in Sinervo’s lab currently study on-the-ground adaptations to climate change, like how “moms reprogram their babies for the future” by passing on altered hormones or genes.

Sinervo, who is currently most enthusiastic about reforesting the Amazon, acknowledges his efforts to “normalize” extinction through comedy, social media and other channels is “more on the edge” in the world of buttoned-up climate scientists. It makes sense, since his research has always been kind of unusual.

Miles, his collaborator, says looking at the bright side is the only real option. Reached while on a research trip in France during another intense heat wave last month, he was enthusiastic about Germany’s efforts to cut coal-fired electricity and ramp up renewable energy. In the U.S., a wave of young, insurgent left-wing politicians are also raising the profile of a “New Green Deal” or similar drastic shift away from fossil fuels.

“Species can recover,” Miles says.

Sinervo harkens back to his first job as a lumberjack cutting down trees in Canada with his brothers (one of whom, Pekka, is also a first-generation college graduate and physicist who studies the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” often described as a fundamental building block of the universe). He remembers a day when he was 16 and had to cut down an old-growth balsam tree. He started to consider the equilibrium between nature and human livelihood. “I went, ‘Wow, I’m gonna change things when I get older,’” Sinervo says.

He sees the global mobilization to close the ozone hole by slashing the use of man-made chemicals as a prime example of humanity’s capacity to confront existential threats. Until then, he’ll do whatever he can to get other people to join him.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” Sinervo sang at his recent comedy debut, channeling R.E.M., “and I feel fine.”

Susan Landry contributed to this story.

Jeff Dondero, 70, is a former Marin County resident and journalist who wrote for the “Pacific Sun,” the “Marin Independent Journal” and other papers in the 1970s. He now lives in Rohnert Park.

“I probably worked for every suburban paper in Marin County,” he says in an interview with the ‘Pacific Sun.’ Along the way he became interested in green construction and sustainability issues. He published “The Energy Wise Home” and “The Energy Wise Workplace” in 2017. He takes on America’s trash problem in “Throwaway Nation: The Ugly Truth About American Garbage,” published this year by Rowman & Littlefield.

“We’re the first generation that’s literally burying ourselves in our own crap,” he says of his fellow baby boomers. An avid sailor, he says our trash is piling up in the oceans, too. “You can’t go anywhere on the ocean without seeing our garbage.”

And human refuse doesn’t stop on earth.

As he writes in “Throwaway Nation,” space itself is now cluttered with our trash. The moon alone has 400,000 pounds of trash on it, and space junk abounds in the outer atmosphere, putting what Dondero sees as the imminent space tourism industry on a collision course with interstellar trash.

He paints a grim picture, but holds out hope that the same technological savvy and push for profit that created these mountains of trash will convert our waste into new resources.

“We have to plan, but we’re trying to catch up from decades of abuse,” he says. “It’s everybody’s responsibility.”—Stett Holbrook

Excerpts from Throwaway Nation, the Ugly Truth About American Garbage

If we were guests, we would have been asked to leave. As proprietors, our property value would have plummeted. As groundskeepers, we would have been fired. Just because we are the dominant species doesn’t mean we own the place and can be passive guests. We have the responsibility to leave it for those who come next. We have influenced conditions on this planet throughout its history—and objectively not for the better. It seems that it wasn’t enough to befoul just the planet; now we are also leaving our left-behinds in space and on other planets.

Space Junk

Thank God man cannot fly and lay waste to the sky as well as the earth. — Henry David Thoreau.

The good news is that no one has ever been injured or killed due to falling space junk. The bad news is that unless we clean up our extraterrestrial neighborhood, space travel, especially in orbit, is very likely going to be deadly. In space are thousands of collisions with space junk waiting to happen.

We are responsible for the mess of “orbital debris” that we left by accident, neglect, or design, and dumped on the moon and Mars—our newest extraterrestrial “spacefills.” Humans have a real nasty habit of discarding their stuff wherever they go. According to NASA, hundreds of millions of pieces of space debris are now floating through our region of the solar system.

Elon Musk is the newest name in contributing to the junkyard of space. He may be a way-cool space entrepreneur, but he’s debuting in space as a high-class litterer, contributing to the accumulation of space scrap in the next phase in Earth’s interplanetary journeys. In 2018, SpaceX, Musk’s company, launched a cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its dummy “driver,” Star Man, on its Falcon Heavy rocket, blasting David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” on its way to Mars orbit. We don’t mean to be a spoil-space-sport about this, but come on—the car isn’t exactly going to be “draggin’ the cosmos” and doing hot laps on the red planet.

The moon, our next-door neighbor, has felt the negligent hand of humans with our various detritus, including astronaut poop and barf bags. This, of course, has conservationists very concerned about the moon’s protection should further trips there be undertaken. At present Tranquility Base is still tranquil, as there is not any wind or rain up there to damage or blow things around or, at the moment, any more tourists to leave things behind. But it looks as if not much thought has been given to protection of our rocky satellite or laws enacted regarding its protection. As yet, only California and New Mexico have recognized the moon as an international historic sight, and for now, it isn’t recognized as a historic landmark or considered a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In 2009, NASA and The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, convened a space junk wake-up call. The team took a hard look at the issues and challenges of de-cluttering space of human-made orbital rubble.

But whatever the method, it’s time we started to clean up our act. Maybe that’s why we haven’t had direct contact with any extraterrestrial beings—they just can’t stand our mess.

Fish to Farm to Table to Trash

People don’t know whether to be astonished, ashamed or amused when it comes to the magnitude of food that Americans throw away. No other country in the history of the world has the ability to raise, produce, eat and toss out as much as we do.

Mothers still shake fingers at their children admonishing fussy eaters, “Just think of all the children in the world that are starving and would love this food you’re wasting.” Of course, most of us answered, “OK, send it to them.” Fact is, mom was right. And so were we, kind of, because we export more food than any other nation on Earth, more than $135 billion each year.

All levels of the food system are riddled with waste—farming, harvesting, transportation, packaging, wholesale and retail marketing, and finally our tables. Food waste levels are 20 to 25 percent of manufacturing, 15 to 20 percent of retail sales and 55 to 65 percent from consumers.

The truth is there’s enough food to feed every single person in America if we can help farmers, manufacturers and retailers get the food to the people who need it. That’s why the Feeding America network and its partners work with farmers and food companies to rescue food and deliver it to families facing hunger. Things could be changing on the food waste front, with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the EPA setting the first-ever national food waste reduction goal, aimed at cutting national food waste in half by 2030.

Food facts and figures:

• Less than 1 percent of pesticides applied to crops reach the pest, the rest poison the ecosystem. Each year 25 million people are poisoned by pesticides in less-developed countries and over 20,000 die.
• One-third of the world’s fish catch and more than one-third of the world’s total grain output are fed to livestock—the most wasteful way to produce protein. It takes 175 gallons of water to produce an eight-ounce soy burger, and a whopping 450 gallons of water to produce a quarter-pound beef burger. [Grassfed beef, however, is far less water intensive].
• About 50 percent more food is wasted today per person than in the mid-1970s and more than two-thirds of the food we throw away is edible.
• Food is so cheap and available to most families that they throw out up to 25 percent of their food and beverages. This can cost the average family between $1,365 and $2,275 annually.
• A study by the University of Arizona found that 14 percent of the food trashed in America was not even unpackaged.
• A 20 percent reduction in food waste would be enough to feed 25 million Americans. Five percent of Americans’ leftovers could feed four million people for one day.
• Between 40 and 50 percent of wasted food uses up 25 percent of all fresh water in the United States.
• It costs $750 million to dispose of food thrown away annually.

Trendy to Trash

It’s high irony that the industries that produce haute couture; flawlessly colored and perfectly cosmetized faces and hair; and impeccably lighted, posed, and glossy high-fashion photos are also industries whose dirty secrets are hidden in clothes closets.

The fashion industry (including cosmetics) is the second-dirtiest business in the world, right after oil and petroleum products, with rampant production schedules and unconscionable recycle rates. A lot of power is needed to produce 150 billion-plus articles of clothing each year and most of the countries where those garments are produced use coal for their energy source. This helps to explain why the apparel industry is responsible for 10 percent of all carbon waste emissions globally. According to a 2013 report cited by Esquire magazine, the global apparel industry produced enough garments in 2010 to provide 20 new articles of clothing for every person on the planet.

The incredible 500 percent increase in worldwide clothes production since the 1990s is due largely to teenagers and trendy “fast fashion.” Today, the fashion industry and the culture of throwaway clothing it has inspired have produced some startling statistics. The average American throws away more than 82 pounds of textiles per year. We’re buying more than 80 billion new items of clothing each year in this country, much of which is not being reused, recycled or repurposed.

Thinking Inside and Outside the Box

Who hasn’t experienced “wrapping rage” trying to dislodge some desired doodad from the bondage of a heat-sealed plastic blister pack clamshell or other encasement? What’s worse is that over-packaging mania accounts for a third of the waste thrown away in the United States.

And, less than 14 percent of plastic packaging, which is the fastest-growing form of packaging, gets recycled. Packaging adds twenty-nine million tons of non-biodegradable waste to landfills every year.

Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, which require 12 million barrels of oil to manufacture. Of all the plastic problems people face, the aggravating single-use plastic bag is the baddie. There was recently a kind of a test case for bagging the problem in California. The state has been in the lead for many ecological causes in the past. Proposition 67, a plastic bag law, was passed in 2016.

And the ban seems to be working. In San Jose the storm drain systems are 89 percent cleaner and streets and creeks have been reported as 60 percent cleaner. In Los Angeles County, the ban resulted in a 94 percent reduction in single-use bag use. In Alameda County, officials reported finding 433 plastic bags, compared to 4,357 in 2010. Monterey County reported even better news, with volunteers discovering only 43 plastic bags while performing their clean-up efforts, compared to 2,494 in 2010.

So, either people are so cheap that they’re using fewer bags because they have to buy them, or they’re getting the message about plastic pollution, or a little of both.

Then there’s the question of recyclability. Plastic juice pouches and drink boxes are generally not recyclable. The 1.4 billion Capri Sun pouches thrown away every year laid end-to-end would reach nearly halfway to the moon. NRDC joined the Make It, Take It campaign (a coalition of organizations devoted to waste recycling and resource conservation) to ask companies like Kraft, which produces and distributes Capri Sun, to use recyclable, reusable or compostable packages for beverages. They have made comments about an effort to recycle, but when asked if they plan to improve their packages or efforts to improve the sustainability of their product, CapriSun declined to comment.

Eight in 10 Americans are now shopping online, accounting for about 10 percent of all retail sales, and just about all products arrive in cardboard boxes.

Every day at the Recology plant in San Francisco, approximately 625 tons of recyclables, including more than one hundred tons of cardboard, are collected, and the amount of plastic film has increased for eleven consecutive years. Plastic film recycling—a category that includes flexible product wraps, bags, and commercial stretch film made primarily from polyethylene (PE)—has increased nearly 84 percent since the first report was issued in 2005.

China, our best customer for garbage, is setting new limits on the contamination it will allow in mixed paper bales that American trash companies ship for recycling. “They’ve started getting more rigorous, even tearing open bales at customs,” said Chaz Miller, policy director for the National Waste & Recycling Association. Because the income from exporting our garbage to China often subsidizes the cost of some neighborhood garbage collection programs, taking less of America’s used paper will cause our bills to collect, recycle, or dispose of it, to rise.

And guess what—many of the items we order online are made in China and come in recycled cardboard boxes from paper material bought from the United States.

Opening Pandora’s Pharmacy

There’s a persistent and pervasive, high-priced illness in America today. It’s the overly expensive, overly prescribed and incredibly wasteful amount of American medicine made available to the public under and over the counter, in concert with doctors and America’s big pharma. It’s hand in hand in glove with one of the worst effects of modern medical technology—the belief that whatever ails us, taking a pill will kill it no matter the cost or waste.

The average American takes about 12 medications annually compared to seven 20 years ago. Back then, spending on drugs totaled about 5 percent of the total US health care costs, now it’s more like 17 percent. Spending on prescription medications has increased by a knockout of $200 billion in two decades.

We take a total of 2.9 billion trips annually to purchase retail over-the-counter (OTC) products. On average, U.S. households spend about $338 per year on OTC products. This amounts to tens of billions of dollars spent on vitamins, supplements, diet pills, cold cures, herbal remedies and other medicaments—providing incredible economic benefits to the companies that manufacture them.

Part of the growth of the almost half-trillion-dollar medical industry was brought about by waste—both in over-prescribing by the pharmaceutical and medical industry and in the discarding of medicine by consumers. Lamentably, methods of drug waste disposal are causing a major health hazard. Consumers aren’t the only ones tossing their drugs down the drain or in the garbage. The Associated Press estimates hospitals and long-term medical care institutions across the United States dump 250 million pounds of pharmacologically active drugs that can have severe effects on humans and wildlife directly into public sewer systems each year.

A study published in the BMJ concluded Medicare and private insurers, as well as patients, pay companies about $1.8 billion a year for medications that are thrown away—that’s 10 percent of drug companies’ projected 2016 revenue of $18 billion. Add another $1 billion to doctors and hospitals as price markups on those discarded medications. Those profits would not exist if companies sold vial sizes more in line with the needs of patients, researchers suggest, and the problem is not unique to cancer drugs.