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What is all this garbage?
It now appears that the true measure of modern humans may be the beer can by the highway, the plastic six-pack necklace, the rusted truck by the side of the road.
Yet it has been only 4500 years that we have been “civilized” enough to leave behind anything that could be identified as trash. We began producing tools and agricultural implements, erecting cities and laying pipes for irrigation, fabricating jewelry to decorate the Temple, in about 2500 b.c.e. Our “accomplishment” is that in one blink of the cosmic eye — only the last l/50th-second of the day since the Big Bang began it all—we have pretty much “trashed” our home planet, polluting the land, fouling the seas, now finally filling the air with poisons and space junk.
How did it happen? Well, we in the West came to consciousness right in the middle of a natural catastrophe. Thirty-five hundred years ago, in the volcanic cataclysm that produced the legend of Atlantis (Pellegrino, 1991), we found ourselves surrounded by mayhem and death. Terrified, traumatized, and befuddled just as we crossed over from oral to literate culture, our attempts to give reasonable shape to modern civilization got off to a shaky start.
What we experienced then, how the forces of nature and circumstance combined to route Western civilization in the direction that our histories now record and celebrate, is an arresting example of the processes of evolution at work. In just 2000 years, a series of events occurred around the eastern end of the Mediterranean that has affected the life of the planet and the arrangements of the human community to this day. To appreciate that critical moment fully, we need a picture of the larger processes at work, the context of the drama.