Thread by @touchmoonflower

A bright and shining example of the suicidal absurdity of technocapitalist society occurs every year at this time, all across the country.
1/n

Deciduous trees spend all Spring taking nutrients out of the soil to make leaves, which photosynthesize all Summer and Fall

When the cold comes, those leaves fall (the technical term is "dehisce") and the trees go dormant for the Winter.

All across this great land, people proceed to fire up specialized machines literally called "leaf blowers", which burn irreplaceable fossil fuels, pumped out of the ground at great expense, to produce, in addition to carbon monoxide and noise, powerful blasts of forced air.

They blow the leaves into immense piles, and then rake them into huge bags made of polyethylene, a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement which will take longer to decompose than the geologic processes which produced the fuel to begin with; a very, very long time.

These bags full of leaves are then loaded onto trucks which, burning fossil fuels, move them to giant areas called "landfills" -- where the leaves, trapped in plastic, undergo anaerobic decomposition, and, rather than releasing their nutrients back into the soil,

turn to slime and sulfurous gasses.

This entire process means that, wherever modern humans congregate, the soil quickly becomes impoverished, as the nutrients required for cyclic leaf production are removed, rather than stored in the ground,

producing a kind of grey, dusty soil that when I was a professional gardener we immediately recognized and referred to as "blower disease".

It is all so astonishingly pointless and debased and wasteful that it would probably be better not to spend too much time contemplating it; let us turn out attention to more pleasant things
/end