American wasteland

How we became slaves to a mindless, wasteful, ugly ideal of convenience

Garbage and the Statue of Liberty.
(Image credit: Illustrated | PN_Photo/iStock, Delpixart/iStock)

The almost unfathomable volume of modern Americans' wastefulness would have been astonishing to anyone in any previous civilization throughout human history. A person who lived before the middle of the last century would not have believed it possible for even a very wealthy household to possess in a lifetime what even the poorest Americans throw away in a year.

We should thus applaud Seattle for officially becoming the first major U.S. city to ban plastic drinking straws. It's a small step, but one of the few inarguably wholesome public policy decisions that have been made recently by any government at any level.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.