Abundance

I spent most of today setting up a garage sale as a fundraiser for my church.  Most of the items for sale never belonged to me personally, but to folks for whom we have done estate sales, or were things we aquired with the intention of passing them along anyway.  In a business like ours, an auction business, we come across a huge variety and quantity of items, some of which receive little interest at one type of sale, and yet would bring in more money at another.  So, they find their way into one of our connex boxes waiting for the day when the ideal buyer might be present at an auction.  In many cases, the ideal buyer doesn't show up, so not infrequently we go looking for the right purchaser. 

Over the years we have acquired a huge variety of goods, so that in nearly every case, if someone needs something, no doubt we have it.  When people ask us what types of items we have auctioned, I like to say, "everything from airplanes to zippers."  There are a few things we haven't auctioned, like pornographic materials, certain types of weapons, and perhaps a whole class of things that I wouldn't know much about anyway (use your imagination.)  It has been, to say the least, an interesting business.

What impresses me most, however, is not the variety of goods, the various prices they fetch, or even the sheer quantity of them.  What always amazes me, especially when some items don't even get a bid, is how blessed we are in this country to  have at our disposal (pun intended) such an amazing array of items to make our lives easier, more enjoyable and simply more interesting.  I sometimes feel like those mothers of years past who would remind their children to clean their plates, because children, somewhere in the world, were starving.  The wealth of the United States is such that we throw away the things that folks in poorer parts of the world would scavenge from dumps to sell in order to buy their next meal--the one after that would require more scrounging, no doubt.

The implications of this for our planet, our future, and the well-being of all the people of this world are huge.  The oft-quoted statistic of 6% of the world's population consuming 40% of its resources does not account for the fact that we don't really "consume" much of anything at all, except perhaps food, water and fuel (and we waste incredible amounts of these as well.)  Moreover, we discard a tremendous amount of the goods produced with those resources.  It is my contention that future societies will mine our garbage dumps for minerals which will be too scarce and too expensive to mine conventionally in their naturally occuring locations--and not just minerals, but a variety of products.

In a very real sense, our auction company recycles many tons of goods each year, not just by keeping usable items out of the landfills by selling them to new users, but also by bringing additional tons of scrap metal, aluminum, wood, and a variety of items to local recyclers.  Ultimately though, some things have no market in this country because there aren't enough folks who are willing to repurpose them.  Those things we must bring to the local dump.  It is what we bring to the dump that most sickens me. 

A few years ago I visited the museum at the University of Oregon in Eugene.  Because it was the year of the Beijing Summer Olympics there was a fascinating  display of photographs from China.  While they were all compelling, perhaps the most intriguing were the ones of workers sorting through trash piles that had been barged from the West to China.  With what appeared to be amazing efficiency, the detritus of our more privileged existences had been organized into massive piles.  It made me think back to my childhood when I wished I could package up my tuna noodle casserole and send it to China.  And while we aren't shipping the unwanted dinners of our children overseas, our underutilized and discarded goods are being shipped there, along with our money, to buy back the goods made of our waste.