Garbage in Mali and America by risa
“Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He delt in human behavior, people’s habits and impulses, their uncontrolable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He’d seen a hundered landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?”
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“The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us”Don Delillo Underworld 185
Michael in Mali part 1: Arrival
Michael in Mali part 2: Moto Yamaha
Michael in Mali part 3: Chez Moi
On the Niger: the first photo in the series
The Streets of Mopti: the second photo in the series
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