E=mc2

Today I witnessed cowboy ethic in practice -and to tell you the truth, it was pretty depressing. I was standing in the parking lot of the grocery store and saw a man throw a paper cup full of ice out the window of his car as he sped through the intersection. He just rolled down his widow, chucked the cup out onto the street, and then rolled his window back up, apparently without any remorse, whatsoever. I stood there initially wanting to yell out and call the man names, but I realized that he was simply behaving like a cowboy, the same as millions of other Americans do. He was just passing through, felt no sense of ownership for the area, and so felt no obligation to keep it clean. I'm fairly certain he would have felt differently had the cup been thrown into his own backyard, but as the saying goes "out of sight, out of mind." And that's just the problem. Too many people don't realize that their garbage, their exhaust fumes, and their CFCs don't just disappear. It's the law of conservation of matter/energy: matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only converted from one form to another. When you throw away an aluminum can, a paper towel, a cigarette butt, a broken light bulb, ect. you aren't just magically rid of it. It doesn't just go away. It gets buried in a landfill, where it sits for hundreds, if not thousands of years (and that's not an exaggeration). An oak leaf takes about a year to totally decompose on the forest floor, and it's supposed to be there. By contrast, a paper bag takes about ten years to completely break down -and that's assuming ideal conditions-, while a plastic bottle can take 700 years, and a glass bottle is estimated to take a million years or longer to break down. Couple those inconvenient details with the reality that Americans use about four million plastic bottles in an hour, and that three out of every four bottles Americans use is thrown in the trash. This is definitely indicative of a consumer culture that is just "passing through."
No matter how tightly you pack it, how far away you carry it, how deep you bury it, and regardless of whether if you burn it, pulverize it, dump it in the ocean or blast it into outer space, our garbage doesn't go anywhere. People at large don't realize that we aren't just passing through, but that we're pretty much stranded on this "spaceship" called planet Earth and that we have to carry with us any waste we produce. What's more, is that our space ship is a shared home, and when that big rig drives down the street puffing black fumes into the air, he's puffing them into my air. When that guy throws his paper cup out the window into the street, he's throwing his trash in my street. This conflict of shared space and shared resources is clearly illustrated in the current global squabble concerning overfishing, and it's also reminiscent of Kohak's example of the sheep on the communal pasture. The problem: fish are being fished to extinction, so, obviously you just have to catch less. The issue is that the fish move around in a communal ocean, and if you don't catch them, then someone else is going to, so fishermen continue to catch gross amounts of fish in the same way that the villagers want to graze more and more sheep on the communal pasture. The mentality being, if I don't graze my sheep there, then my neighbor will, and then there won't be any grass left, so I might as well. We're using the world's resources and producing waste at an alarming rate, ruining the world for ourselves and others.
Kohak concedes that most of us don't consider that we're making a choice that affects people and organisms all over the world when we start up our cars. We don't take second to consider that the decision to do so or to not do so concerns more than ourselves. The space ship ethic forces the individual to view the world as that communal pasture, and we can either all agree to sustainably graze our sheep, or kill the land with our selfish competition. Regardless, we don;t live in a vacume, as our decisions concern everyone else on the ship, and our trash doesn't magically disappear.