Beacons Of Waste

I moved to Georgia from Germany due to my dad's job, and it was a stark contrast. The roads were straighter and had more clearance from the forests and woods. It was only after I had volunteered for a chairty that I realized that there was so much going to waste. We showed up to a woman's house. The house was clean and orderly, but the yard around it was trashed and cluttered. Her husband was a wounded warrior and she was going to medical school, so neither of them could take very good care of the grounds. We were there to help pick up and make it more manageable for them. We wound up cutting down a lot of the smaller trees and simply using that wood as tinder and fuel for burn piles for the trash that would burn. The single large tree that we had to cut down (because of it's proximity to the house and some power cables installed on the property) was chopped up and anyone that wanted parts of it took some of it home, but about half of it went to fueling the burn piles, as I remember it. At the time, it seemed reasonable, but thinking back, we cleared out a lot of woods just to burn it, instead of finding a more environmental use for it and efficient way of getting rid of the trash.