Waste and garbage… a distinctive characteristic of humanity – shared by few of the other animals. An exception is the Bandar-Log, the Monkey People of Rudyard Kipling’s Seeonee jungle of India. Here is the entirety of a poem from his 1894 Jungle Book.

“Road-Song of the Bandar-Log”

Here we go in a flung festoon,

Half-way up to the jealous moon!

Don't you envy our pranceful bands?

Don't you wish you had extra hands?

Wouldn't you like if your tails were — so —

Curved in the shape of a Cupid's bow?

Now you're angry, but — never mind,

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

Here we sit in a branchy row,

Thinking of beautiful things we know;

Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,

All complete, in a minute or two —

Something noble and grand and good,

Won by merely wishing we could.

Now we're going to — never mind,

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

All the talk we ever have heard

Uttered by bat or beast or bird —

Hide or fin or scale or feather —

Jabber it quickly and all together!

Excellent! Wonderful! Once again!

Now we are talking just like men.

Let 's pretend we are... never mind,

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

This is the way of the Monkey-kind.

Then join our leaping lines that scumfish through the pines,

That rocket by where, light and high, the wild-grape swings,

By the rubbish in our wake, and the noble noise we make,

Be sure, be sure, we're going to do some splendid things!

When men first took more permanent shelter in caves, they faced, with mixed results, the problem of waste disposal.

As time progressed, and population densities mounted, the streets and gutters became overwhelmed with, amidst other trash, animal (including human) excrement. Sewage disposal shifted (or replace the previous “f” with a “t”) the problem to something worse — rivers, lakes and streams. Waste disposal, laundry, bathing, and drinking, all shared the same water.

And so, in our inexhaustible wisdom, we turned to the oceans. Most everything, especially human waste, was biodegradable. And though there were problems with bivalves and other seafood, that was manageable. For instance, the Hebrews had simply declared all but the finned fish: unkosher, and escaped hepatitis A, and worse.

But as we moved from natural fibers for food and structures, the problems worsened, and finally, radio-actives and plastics have come to pollute our soil, water, thus food, ultimately destroying huge ecosystems, and perhaps even that of the oceans.

But it doesn’t end there. Out in “space, the final frontier” each launch adds to our orbital debris. And each collision of orbital flotsam and jetsam multiplies the number of objects that will ultimately provide a barrier to off-world activities.

From NASA (5/26/2021): “More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or ‘space junk,’ are tracked by the Department of Defense's global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more debris — too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions — exists in the near-Earth space environment.

“… They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are half a million pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger…”

We never learn — not the man-in-the-street, the trusted scientists, the government, nor the New World Order.

Dreck.