What We Leave Behind: A Birdwatcher’s Dispatches from the Waste Catastrophe

“Trash is a bit like birds. Both have their favourite habitats. I thought it might be worth taking a closer look at what we throw away and what it says about us. To follow the journey of the items we buy and discard. I wanted to find out more about what they’re made of and what fate the future has in store for them.” It starts with a day at the beach. A single white sock in the sand that somehow seems to spoil everything. It’s enough to send Polish reporter and ornithologist Stanislaw Lubienski on a quest to understand what we throw away, where it goes and whether it will be our lasting legacy. By analysing items he unearths on his trips into nature – a plastic bottle, a tube of Russian penis-enlargement cream, a cigarette butt, an empty aerosol can – tracing their origins, their destination and the harm they can do, he shows how our consumer society has developed out of our control, to the point of environmental catastrophe. He also looks with a birdwatcher’s eye at how various animals have come to adapt to and even rely on the rubbish we pollute their environment with, and at the cultural significance of trash and rubbish and the origins of our throw-away society. And in the finest Gonzo traditions, he inserts himself into his narrative by examining his own “environmental neurosis” and by going out with refuse crews to watch them work. Translated from the Polish by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones