Waste is the inevitable byproduct of cleanliness, order, and beauty. Cultivation always involves waste. Communication comprises signal-noise relationships, a message carried by a medium that is never reducible to the message. We might try to exclude and hide waste and noise, but what we so put to one side, bury, ignore, has a habit of returning to haunt.

If waste is discard and matter out of place, excess and of no current need, and if waste is such an essential component of any productive expenditure of energy, in building and running a city, in growing and consuming food, in making sense and meaning, do we not need a theory of the need for such loss? Because there are always wastelands, unproductive expenditures, things one never gets over, since they don’t fit and cannot be redeemed, garbage that cannot be recycled.