The environmental state of nations is something that is always on my mind, and we’d all like to think that things are somehow getting better despite all the bad news we see about contamination of the land, sky and water that we depend on for our very survival on this planet.

But I recently came across some powerful words on this subject that, for me, raise sharp questions about just how far we have come in dealing with the pollution that we ourselves have wrought on the world. I share these words with you now in the hope that they may move you too.

This is a short essay titled “Wasteland” by the late author Marya Mannes (1904-1990), and it was published in her book More in Anger in 1958 in the United States. Though somewhat forgotten today, Mannes was one of the more well-known writers, editors and social critics of her time, and her words often took clear aim at the hypocrisy of life in the USA and the so-called “American Dream”.

Reading this essay from 55 years ago, it’s amazing to see how right on target she was in questioning not only the environmental devastation we’ve inflicted on Mother Earth, but the rampant materialism that has led us to that place. Mannes is speaking in this essay about the United States, of course, but today in the 21st century these words could just as easily be about Japan or any other country. That’s how far we haven’t come in dealing with the state of the world’s environment.

Here, then, are the words of “Wasteland” by Marya Mannes....

Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shining in the sun or picked by moon or the beams of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity.

Who are these men who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the men who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink — and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap?

What manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and two hundred horsepower to take them, singly to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass?

What kind of men can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who leave the carcasses of cars to rot in heaps; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town's rats? What manner of men choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce, making poison of water?

Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one land, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of man and the stigma of his improvidence.

Who is so rich that he can squander forever the wealth of earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed, or so prosperous in land that he can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

And what will we leave behind us when we are long dead? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure?

Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of shores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and light-bulbs and boxes of a people who conserved their convenience at the expense of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste.