In the mid 80s while travelling with friends along Italy's Amalfi coast i observed a seagull gliding above the rocky cliffs. There was nothing particularly unusual about the seagull but on this occasion I noted with some surprise, that it travelled hundreds of yards with little effort. A mere tilt of its wing, slight shift of its body, took it up or down, right or left.
But for expended body heat, minor muscle exertion, a turn of the head, the distance covered by the gull was accomplished with little or no waste.
At the same time I remembered camera footage of the space shuttle launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the great plume of smoke exhausted by it.
Human waste, to a certain extent, defines human evolution. We have become what we are in accordance with our waste and that we waste has prevented us from evolving to where we could be without waste.
Many a tale has been told of ascetics who eat one bean a day, drink a glass of milk several times a month or eat leaves upon occasion. Whether exact tales or not such stories do focus on the basic inadequacies of the human digestive system and suggest it can be improved upon by “conscious” effort and conditioning.
Beyond this and within reach of the average man are day-to-day episodes of forgetfulness, anger and dishonesty that may constitute wasted energy which, if made available to us, would assist a personal and collective rise in evolutionary possibilities.
Waste in relation to man refers to all energy baring quantities which pass by us or through us without our exerting a controlled intention over them.
For the sun, sunlight is a waste product which defines the sun's nature as a sun. Were our sun or any sun to cease giving off light it would no longer exhibit the nature of a sun. That man wastes as he does defines man's nature as a human. By this definition, a mankind without waste would no longer be mankind as we know it to be. Would a mankind undefined be more evolved or less? Is definition wasteful? Does a sun sans light become more or less evolved in its world?
We fight waste because we believe it is the right thing to do. Waste looks, smells and sounds bad. Our extensive efforts to increase computation speeds which generate less heat and therefore less waste address the evolution of computers and many computation systems.
Our eventual discovery and application of the human bio-electric system as the power source we “plug into” to run personal computers implies an evolutionary advance for both man and the computer.
I tell my eldest son, guard your words, don't waste your tears, clean your room, finish your chores, from what you have learned today write me a story. The intention behind these activities is to evolve him from the world of the child to that of the man.
Are instructions such as these, once fulfilled, equivalent to evolutionary milestones? Can I assure my son that his adherence to these standards will do much to guarantee a less wasteful and therefore more evolved life?
As it is with so many aspects of life, waste may or may not be wasteful. For us absolute judgments are difficult to ascertain due to the brevity of our lives and the very long cycles even the smallest action must pass through before it reaches maturity or what we perceive as maturity.
“Waste not, want not”, perhaps, or perhaps not. I wrote this article, to avoid wasting time, while waiting for a plane. Thomas Easley was artist-in-residence at The Times of India in the 1990s.