In December 2020, Nature published a report detailing a cataclysmic shift  in humanity’s relationship with Earth. The total mass of the world’s humanmade objects, its authors explained, had come to equal the entire biomass of  the planet itself. That is to say, the weight of everything created by our  hands—skyscrapers, automobiles, iPads, plastic straws—was on the verge  of exceeding that of all trees and all plants, all animals and all humans,  indeed the mass of all living things put together. 17  Let’s put this another way: You are currently living in a world in which  the human ability to create garbage—or eventual garbage—has surpassed  Earth’s ability to generate life.  Reading Nature’s findings, my first thoughts went to Vance Packard.  The son of Pennsylvania dairy farmers, Packard foresaw—maybe earlier  than anyone—a world in which our obsession with pumping out new  products would surpass our care for the resources that go into them.  Packard was something of a seismographer of the tectonics underlying the  American dream, a journalist who liked to pull the curtain back on the story  of economic mobility that purported to liberate Americans from old-world  hardships and identify the charlatans and chancers quietly cashing in. He  remains best known for his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, a cutting  account of the myriad ways in which US consumers were being marionetted  by a rising class of advertising executives into purchasing things they did  not need—and it never occurred to them they wanted.

cIap, AIesander. Trash Wars: Exploring the Wild Afterlife of Waste (p. 16). Kindle Edition.