Messing Up, Cleaning Up

 AS IT HAS DONE EVERYWHERE ELSE, the human species has massive polluted the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere, in orbit, where deep space begins. Tens of thousands of orbiting satellites of sundry sorts have been launched into orbit by many countries, have served their purpose, become obsolete, ceased functioning with age, and, like so much other material of human manufacture, have been conveniently discarded and ignored, there to remain forever as pollution. Its getting to the point where any astronaut who travels into upper Earth orbit is risking her life, because the possibility of collision with  rapidly moving space debris is becoming increasingly real. Scientists are well aware of this, although the public isn't, and are trying to design and facilitate the tricky problem of removing and cleaning up tons of space debris. It is apparent that it will be an expensive process, like all other massive clean up efforts, and, like most other problems, would have been far easier to contend with had it been addressed long ago, when there were far fewer junk piles in orbit. Maybe some sort of huge mesh net could be dragged around the world a few times. The list of human dung heaps is long, and lengthening. The lower atmosphere is full of carbon, the upper atmosphere is full of space junk, are full of plastic and other poisons. The ground itself is full of plastic and land fills, and discarded, toxic chemicals of a wide variety. Fresh water bodies are still polluted with chemicals and garbage, even after decades of clean up, the fruit of corporate freedom and profit. Our bodies are no less full of it. Each day we take in about a debit card's worth of plastic, and much of it remains within us. Where and how do we begin to clean up? By talking about it? The clean up is actually beginning, but not fast enough, nor near enough. With the human population approaching eight billion and no end in sight, and a global economy determined to proceed with the industrial process necessary to make a few million folks incredibly wealthy and the rest of us  pacified and docile, it seems as if the forces of wealth, greed, and filth still outweigh our increasing global awareness of the problem and our desire to clean up our act, for future generations, if not for ourselves. All around us the environment is crashing to its death, as millions of plants and animals become extinct because of human activity, climate change encroaches rapidly, and we continue to defecate where we eat. Time will tell, and it will tell soon, probably before we even know it.