Steinbeck Says

I have been reading Travels With Charley byJohn Steinbeck and came across the following quote. Even though the novel was penned in 1962, this passage seemed perfectly prescient:

"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in ciriticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

Rock on, John.