As we read in many of our readings last week we explored a new perspective of waste– as in items without typical value to us rather than just trash.
One primary category we considered was wasteland, and how unused land or unoccupied land has been seen as waste in the past, or as wasteland. During colonization, many wildernesses were considered this type of waste land, even though a better categorization might have been natural land, just because it was not of use or currently being used productively by colonizers. Yet, despite this, I find that wasteland is a difficult term to use, as we gain so many different valuable uses from land even if we don’t use it for active productive purposes, like farming, infrastructure, and more.
Nature and undeveloped land, though considered “wasteland” by this definition, provides many roles in human health whether for physical health (as it provides many natural remedies and can be beneficial as an escape from urban lifestyles) and can be extremely psychologically beneficial for humans. Additionally, many natural areas are extremely efficient at combatting anthropogenically originated harm to our Earth and are often a buffer system between humans and Earth cycles– carbon as one example. Nature (including the ocean) is an extreme carbon sink and has offset more than 25% of human CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, reducing many potential harms to Earth systems and reduced global climate change more significantly than any other outlet. So despite this view as wasteland, undisturbed or minimally disturbed nature land plays an extremely important role in regulating Earth cycles in relation to humans, and though it often has extreme impacts on this, these processes are not always visible— reducing their visibility and importance to the human eye. This status as wasteland is very controversial, because though the land doesn’t appear to be productively impacting us, it is helping regulate our every day lives in many ways that go unseen.