Every day seven billion people on the planet consume products and generate waste. With increased production for more people, and extensive packaging, our accumulating after-use materials are now overpowering existing disposal facilities.

Earlier practices of just dumping and forgetting “garbage” were addressed by government-organized programs to recover, or reuse, or recycle its marketable components, in order to reduce volume and benefit economically. Whatever was unsalvageable still got dumped into “landfill sites” and unsupervised places from empty lots to oceans.

Muskoka’s waste materials contribute only a smidgen to the global statistics. But we are part of, and touched by, that larger society’s values, and by economies in over-drive producing unusable junk. Our patterns mirror the world’s production of plastics, excessive manufacture of consumer goods, overwrapping of packaged items, and marketing that drives up consumption until yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities. Issues about waste now being addressed in Muskoka, as elsewhere, are created by global economic forces and cultural expectations.

The concept of “waste management” induced us to believe we’d become better stewards of our planet’s finite resources, but it seems we’re still hardwired to just shuck whatever we don’t want.

Canadians produce the world’s most waste per capita, jamming attics, cellars, garages, and dump sites; tossing soiled items akin to garbage into recycling bins; treating roadsides as handy trash repositories. Municipalities, as front-line responders, are confronting anew a problem that, until recently, had been considered well in hand.

China’s ban on waste imports has forced a day of reckoning for everything from the shaky economics of roadside bin collections to radical new economic and environmental trajectories for waste and plastic recyclables within Canada.

Muskoka’s solid waste manager Andrew Guthrie and public works boss Fred Jahn are now discussing with town and township councillors how to revamp waste operations. Gravenhurst’s Richard Corcelli, chair of the public liaison committee for Muskoka’s only engineered landfill facility, writes, “The first cell of Rosewarne Landfill was used up ahead of schedule, due to the impact of receiving increased contaminated recycled goods, as discussed in your Muskoka in Perspective column last week.”

China has stopped buying our recycled plastics. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte recalled his country’s ambassador and consuls from Canada in protest over the Trudeau Government’s stalling since 2017 to remove illegally shipped garbage mislabelled as recyclable plastic. At the cost of millions of tax dollars, those 69 containers of fetid mash are now en route back to Canada. Malaysia is also returning similar waste to our shores.

In related news, Muskoka District government is devising a strategy for managing waste, or at least endorses doing so.

Global economic and environmental patterns are fast reshaping how Muskokans can deal with trash. Last year’s Chinese ban of two dozen types of recyclable commodities, about 95 percent of what that resource-hungry superpower had been importing, turned off the engine driving the world’s recyclable scrap economy. Other recipient Asian countries are balking at taking filthy or unusable “recyclables” because they create environmental hazards, health threats, and end up being burned or illegally dumped. The world’s recently thriving market for recyclable waste has suddenly vanished.

Bracebridge just got more notice in one month than it did for decades, as each national TV breaking news bulletin flashed FLOODING IN COTTAGE COUNTRY.

The water’s subsided, but designating Muskoka as “cottage country” remains on the rise.

A “Cottage Country Family Health Team” occupies half of Gravenhurst’s municipal building. From Bracebridge’s main street, walking up Chancery Lane to the courts, you pass “Cottage Country Financial Services.”

You can arrive crying in Huntsville with Cottage Country Baby, stay alive with medical help from that Cottage Country Family Health Team, remain nourished at MacTier’s Cottage Country Family Diner, then exit through Torrance with Cottage Country Cremations.

Queen Victoria’s birth two centuries ago, onMay 24, 1819, is something many Muskokans celebrate to this day, some even opening a case of beer, “24 for 24!”

Victoria was monarch at the British Empire’s zenith. The Royal Navy ruled the seas, controlling the Atlantic and enjoying an upper hand virtually everywhere else. By waging wars of subjugation, the Imperial Army had extended control over colonial territories. Britain’s empire, larger than any other, covered seven million square kilometres.

George Parkin, a Canadian, created the famous world map on which all that land was shown in red ink. Being a Mercator map, northern and southern regions appeared larger than the equatorial zone, which translated into sprawling Canada accounting for a disproportionate, but impressive, expanse of red. British subjects, Canadians especially, boasted Britain’s was “an Empire on which the sun never set.”

Because the sounds, smells, and sensations of a vintage automobile evoke special joy, offering many such beauties at close range can make for a great event.

To our south Orillia’s yearly car show boasts 400 vehicles, while Barrie’s Classics in the Park draws thousands of enthusiasts who drool over 300 classic machines. To our north Parry Sound’s Downtown Business Association closed off James and Gibson streets last year so vintage car owners and food vendors could set up and cash in.

For car shows to reach their potential, location is as important as what’s displayed. Looking at machinery isn’t reliving a dream. Feeling heat radiating up from the asphalt is unlike breezes off a lake. Want Parry Sound’s barriered streets, or Barrie’s park setting?

Institutions may appear to be free standing entities, but they’re not.

Legislatures, courts, schools, hospitals, banks, libraries, and such, operate daily in an integrated matrix of institutions. Their complementary roles divide functions within a comprehensive overall system of social order. Removing one institution, or even altering it, necessarily impacts the others.

In Muskoka’s municipals last October, one of the worthies seeking election, when asked about Bracebridge Council’s decision to close its main street Carnegie Library, smartly approved. “Nobody reads books anymore!”

“In this day and age,” he pressed, “is there really a need for libraries at all? People get e-books on-line and read them on their personal screens.” If Bracebridge councillors co-locate a library and sports facility at the community’s perimeter, he felt that would be more than’s likely needed.