The Circle Of Leaf: An autumn lesson on waste and reclamation

What purpose does a fallen leaf serve?  

Its time as beautiful fall foliage has ended. It’s no longer claimed by the tree that grew it, and now it simply sits on the ground. Does that make it garbage? 

I don’t think so. This leaf will break down over the coming winter and replenish the Earth with the nutrients it borrowed. This leaf will live on in the soul of the Earth, as all things tend to do. However, more often than not, in autumn, we mistake the leaf for something useless; we mistake this passing state for its end, so we rake it and throw it away. The concept of waste is a human invention.  

If we look at nature, we see a remarkable circle of life, death and rebirth, where everything serves a purpose and nothing is discarded, only transformed. In this circle, everything comes back to where it started, like the leaves returning to the forest floor or water falling as rain back down to Earth. If we compare this to our own cycle of production, consumption and waste, we see a clear difference: ours doesn’t come full circle.  

Take a plastic coffee cup, for example. It began as a fossil fuel, perhaps natural gas; it was mined deep underground and processed into its more familiar form. Then, it was used to hold an iced latte for maybe an hour, before being judged to have run its course and thrown away. The issue is that at this point, we have molded the raw material past recognition, and now it is stuck in this unnatural condition, not even close to returning to its original state. What was meant to be a circle has been cut off to an arc, and with every new thing we produce, we simply move more and more matter over to the same dead end. 

This doesn’t work in the present — land use, methane emissions and pollution are just some of the ways in which we continue to take more while returning so little — and the problem is only compounding with time as we continue to meddle with nature. 

Instead of this, the system we need to devise is a lot like a library. We take the resources we need; we do what we need with them and eventually we return them to the environment in good condition so they can be enjoyed once more. 

Getting from where we are now to a zero-waste world is a big jump. Many of the systems we have created necessitate waste. We make so much stuff every day — paper towels, Teflon pans, shampoo, milk cartons — and much of it doesn’t biodegrade or get recycled. Therein lies the heart of the problem. The reason that it’s so difficult to imagine a world without waste is that we’ve built everything off the promise of this non-cycle and the hope that what we discard will simply disappear. But that’s not how things work. 

To change anything, we need a fundamental shift in perspective. I could spend page after page proposing what we could do differently, what things we could eliminate and how to reuse the ones we keep, but none of that matters unless we dispel the assumptions that got us here in the first place: waste is unavoidable, it is acceptable and tabletop composters and metal straws are enough of an effort to protect us. If we want a safe, sustainable world, we have to think beyond how we can minimize our impact and ask what right we have to make that impact at all. 

Once upon a time, humans didn’t harm the planet. It feels like another life, but the Earth remembers it. It doesn’t matter that we’ve now built up one way; it’s not too late to go back to our roots and work in another direction, building circles, not dead ends and treating our resources like a library, not a bookstore. If we can make skyscrapers, if we can fly across the world and to the moon, if we can edit genes and transplant hearts, we can do this.