No, it’s not Harry Potter 7, but a landscape problem: in a relatively recent article in The New York Times, we discover that Ireland’s garbage collection practices have resulted in the production of a new coastline: “The earthen cliffs near this seaside harbor town have been sporting colorful decorations recently: erosion by the gentle waves of the Irish Sea has exposed the scraggly remants of hundreds of blue, black and yellow trash bags.”
A “roaring black market in garbage collection” has produced this new landscape – or, landscape engineering through waste-management practices. It’s a new surface of the earth made of industrial debris (“twisted wrecks of unidentifiable junked machines”).
As the sea encroaches and the artificial terrain of human rubbish is revealed – the new outer edge of the Irish island – we find not bedrock, not archaeological sites, not even *terra firma*, but a bunch of old computers and kitchen waste.
Think of it as the next millennium’s Skara Brae:
To help counter this formation of a counter-landscape, Ireland is funding “what one newspaper called a ‘necklace of incineration’ around Ireland” – that is, a necklace of incineration plants.
In any case, what coasts we have yet to discover (or build)…