Who cleans up after anything we do, really?  
Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view.<p>Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?<p>Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts.  Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around.  We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.<p>We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day.  And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts.  The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country&#x27;s prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism.<p>Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.