No folk music collection is complete without the all-time classic 1967 LP, Arlo Guthrie’s debut, the entire first side of which was the 18-minute opus called Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. It was a sarcastic and irreverent narrative protesting the Vietnam-era draft, beginning with an innocent attempt to help his friend Alice by hauling her large pile of trash to the city dump, only to find it closed on Thanksgiving. He and a friend finally dumped the pile elsewhere, following others who had used the same spot, only to be arrested and convicted of littering, a criminal record that later rendered him unsuitable for the draft.
Guthrie’s bluesy foot-tapping guitar rhythm made it an instant classic, spawning a movie, annual festivals, follow-up albums, and numerous other events. Still regularly played on Thanksgiving, it’s beloved partly because of its length, a saga filled with unimportant and extraneous details that add to its charm. “Massacree” is an old Ozark colloquialism describing an improbably sequence of events that “create great confusion and fuss.” By the time this one ends one forgets that the entire sordid affair, which resulted from a well-meaning attempt to help friends, turned sour for one simple reason – the landfill was closed.
Guthrie got caught but others had done the same because when there is no place to put the trash, well, people find another place to put the trash. That is the crux of a years-long battle raging in Los Angeles because of yet another misguided dream from California’s environmental industry, to eliminate landfills – just close them down. These activists thought they had the perfect example when the city’s Chiquita Canyon landfill experienced a rare chemical reaction that generated heat deep underground in a retired section, resulting in noxious odors and fumes.
Local residents organized as Citizens for Chiquita Canyon Closure and the sensational news coverage prompted city officials to reverse course on a 2022 agreement with the company that manages the landfill. Under that agreement, the location is slated to be phased out anyway, with incoming trash ratcheted down in slow increments over a 5-year period. Meanwhile, the best available technology is being used to mitigate the noxious odor problem and assist residents. That agreement settled several lengthy and complex lawsuits, which will now come back with the agreement voided.
Not good enough, said the angry residents and their environmental allies. They wanted the landfill closed now, which will not solve the noxious odor problem stemming from the earlier situation. That district’s city council member called immediate closure impractical, so she was pilloried by local activists. Editorial writers across the state weighed in on both sides. Almost no one asked the fundamental question – where will they put the trash?
Believe it or not, California’s green dream contemplates the perfect solution. People should simply stop creating trash. Use nothing that comes in packaging, use everything to complete extinction, throw nothing away. No waste of any kind. What an ideal world. What a crock.
This is the same state whose politicians think they can eliminate automobiles, a state whose development and growth evolved entirely around the automobile and whose cities like L.A. are therefore stretched out over hundreds of miles with such low density that cars are the only choice for mobility. The same state that says people should heat their homes without natural gas and just pay whatever to power everything with wind and solar – an infrastructure that does not yet exist even in California. It’s a state where dreams become laws before anyone asks about consequences, consumers can’t afford to live there anymore, taxes are raised to compensate, and to escape the nation’s highest tax burden those who can afford to just pick up and leave.
Everyone wants a cleaner world. The U.S. has done more to improve the environment than any country, its air and water continually improving. Technology is steadily gaining on the worst environmental problems, including landfills – which are nothing like those of prior generations. A century ago, every farm had its own landfill and combustible trash was burned even in major cities, air quality notwithstanding.
Great strides are being taken to clean up such problems, but that requires a healthy economy that generates incentives for achievement, not punishments that put people out of business.
In the case of Chiquita Canyon, the next closest landfill cannot accommodate that much trash, and there are no affordable alternatives. The company closed it on January 1, so people will have to put their trash somewhere else, hopefully not causing another Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.
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