BASURA

“Why don’t we just stop trying to make the world a better place, and start focusing on
not making it worse?”

The magic word read along the roads of México. Some places they will fine you ten Thousand pesos, but no bin to put the trash you find flying around, because the trash car comes when it comes if it comes. Here in Tulum where a lot of tourists take refuge from the stressful daily life, to come here and enjoy the nature that has not yet been destroyed, they litter more than anyone else.
I am daily fighting to avoid my old food habits. Not being able to make our own food or brew our own coffee, we ended up by using a lot of plastic foam cups until I found out that I could by a metal cup and get six refills for free. Now I have drunken all my refills and the lid broke after the fourth refill. We were not careful enough when washing it and now I am trying to live with a broken lid to avoid putting another thing in the trash. Next time I have to be gentler when trying to find out how to do it.

Trash here is not sorted or recycled. Each state has its own BASURA law and way of dealing with it. Here in Tulum, I know and have seen that they don’t collect the trash. If and when they collect, they dump it in the jungle. Trash in its entire magnitude, glass, plastic paper and metal, with all the quemicals dripping down into the ground water without any protection mat. It is said that they got the funding’s to protect the ground, but that they used the money for something else. Last week I encountered an outsider living here in Tulum complaining about the smells on her district. It happened so that the people started smelling fesses at all times as they started observing the trucks driving into the bush. They started getting attacked by insects and one they collected everyone to block the road. Then the trucks just turned around and dumped everything on the nearby cenote. Instead of a cenote they have a growing pile of trash, that no one can do anything about it. One thing is still very clear; the trash and toilet water is coming from the beaches of Tulum and the guests staying on the cabanas. Every day the traffic gets stuck with all the truck transporting water to the hotels and bringing out the shit to dump in the jungle. Soon enough, the ground water will be so contaminated and the jungle so damaged that the tourism will either get a sick holiday or go somewhere else to do their “mindful yoga”.

When I hear stories like this, I slowly loose the appetite of being here. The longer I stay, the more thrash I produce. I will have to put a lot of effort into changing my habits and make most of the food I eat, other ways I won’t have the heart to stay. Not being able to recycle or avoid poisoning the nature with my presence, “I feel guilty in crime”.

If I should come back or continue my travel out in the world, the I should consider the impact and consequences of my habits on society and nature, when I step outside my door.

I should question the existence and importance of things in my life. There is a lot taking space and I do some clean-ups, to be able to keep on breathing.

come and enjoy the beauty outside, I should make a plan of taking home with me all the trash I make (besides your own bodily waste). Sparing the nature for a lot of the trash that is going around.

When I question myself, what is the most awful about Norway the answer is constantly the same. I got tired of all the apparent naive consuming attitude their greed for more and more is the worst. Norway’s renovating culture is to tear down the old and build new, paint new adding a bit of metal a lot of glass. Furniture is thrown away in spite good conditions. And kitchens are renewed every ten years according to Ikeas news. I became tired of working with all the unnecessary littered clothes to the point that I became overworked and depressed.

Now I am here in Mexico basically to work with this theme, with the plan of visiting schools and make them aware of our relation to nature for possible change in attitude. At one point, I saw myself picking all the trash I found along the way, believing that would probably make a little difference and after a while, that would motivate tourists and truck drivers to keep their litter inside their vehicle. Because a littered road is unsafe to drive.
When I try to find who to blame for the cluttered views along the road, I wonder why and who is littering the nature, the evidence is clear as I from time to time watch water bottles flying out of the vehicle in front of us. Intruders, showing very little respect for the road.

The locals, they managed before Europe’s invasion and they still manage quite well without, our standards of consume. Their life is simple. Family and work to survive. Family fiesta again and again and again. Family is very important for a Mexican. When they go on a family holiday they take grandparents and small children, they travel often in groups of 10 – 14 And they bring everything they need for the trip, that way they keep leisure cheap and they get to do holiday together as a family.

The problem is when they leave their trash behind. Two evils happening at the same time: a demanding increase on human consumption and falling education manners. We need to pass on, the education we got from our parents, before it’s too late. We have been busy building careers and houses, cheating our children by giving them games to play with. They learned the games but they did not learn where eggs come from or even how to fry one. We protected them from the fire and from the child labour. We forgot to value our inn heritage. Our relation to education has changed, because of our lack of manner, going around thinking that “problems fixes themselves”, or that someone else will come to clean up after us.

We have been the masses spitting up in the air, convinced to know everything better. Because we are so intelligently developed that we believe we can take all we need. What we don’t need we learn how to become dependent on it, so we end up by needing a lot of things (that are making us sick. Lying to ourselves and giving us the right to kill and destroy what we don’t like in the name of making the world a better place.