Oh Mylar

Washington boasts more geologic, biologic, and cultural diversity than most states. But like all states and throughout itself, there is the commonality of trash.

To this compunction of humans, none more than Americans, to this trail of lost things, abandoned stuff, and outright garbage, to these leavings I owe my livelihood. Even older, wiser cultures left traces, heaps of it in places where they congregated with more than immediate relatives and stayed awhile. We've come a ways since bottoming out on the burning Cuyahoga, but even in 2012, a great many under the spell of Mayan and Christian Apocalypse hucksters, we create trash day in and day out.

It used to be, garbage pretty much stayed around the house. Standard practice in Euro-America was to just toss stuff into the yard. Whatever didn't feed sow, fowl, or microbia got kicked around until disappearing into the brush and eventually the soil (because the microbia will get their way, nearly always). My grandparents were born on farms that dealt with trash by burning it, tossing it in an old cellar, or hauling it off to the swamp-edge of the field. I don't know this for a fact, but in between just throwing stuff out the back door and having it hauled or barged off to god knows where, it's a pretty safe bet that refuse didn't travel too far.

Over the 20th Century, urbanizing America took to hauling rubbish to landfills in some place without clout.  Garbage went global. Not for everyone, but post-WWII American cities extrude waste streams unequaled, eventually across international borders and into the deep blue sea.

And ever since about half past Reagan, into the deep blue sky. In the form of mylar balloons that travel the winds and land far from the crying kids who loosed them. Before mylar, there were rubber ones, but they lose the helium faster and disintegrate a lot faster once they come to ground.


I've seen the flash of a Barney balloon in sagebrush and deep in the woods. Mylar emblazoned with princesses and "Happy Birthday" and "Get Well Soon" and "I Bought You Something That Will Soon Be Trash" turns up everywhere. Most of the state is more or less downwind of the population centers, but I don't know that they all come from Pugetopolis. One day, it would be nice to find one from Japan, I guess. 


As long as future archaeologists are able to identify these as helium balloons, they shouldn't be too confused. Except maybe to wonder what sort of ritual or status display led people to release so many tacky balloons into the winds. If mylar proves to be durable over the long run, it may be another chronological marker of our post-Classic period, before crazy excess went back to being rare. 

There may be a fairly sharp end date for mylar balloons, since helium is bound to become more expensive. That's at least partly because alleged Democrat Bill Clinton signed a 1996 law privatizing the industry and forcing the US Government to sell it's stockpile by 2015. But don't worry, with Texans controlling the reserves and corporations running the show, what could go wrong?