For example, we have these big limb piles all over the property. This is a biproduct of annual limbing and the processing of trees, with the logs used for timber or firewood. Felling trees, you're going to have all sorts of limbs to deal with. You can either use them or try to scatter them in the woods; of course it is good to put material back in the woods too, but the sitting limbs can add to ground fuel for a wildfire if they don't have time to rot and break down.
The limb piles can be useful for all sorts of things, like building with them, or adding coarse woody debris to fill in with or mound things up with. We just got the chipper-shredder running again, which is a gnarly piece of machinery that just loudly chews them up and spits out wood chips, a valuable resource for fill, pathways, and mulching.
Before you get to them, the limb piles make for eyesores, and besides they just take up space that you could be using for something else. Though on the other hand they will break down over time as they sit, and after a while the bugs get to them and enjoy them, and they can serve as habitat.
Anyway, the piles can eventually be processed and used when you get to them, or they can just pile up and sit and take up room and look bad, especially if you keep processing trees without taking a minute. And certainly they make for marvelous fuel for a wildfire if one gets going.
That's part of what sleep is for the individual. The brain and body have time to downshift and process all of that weird chaotic stuff you've been absorbing day in and day out. The brain gets rid of all that gunk building up in its inner recesses and so on.
Capital, as manic and restless as it is, is fond of getting excited about one thing or another, and then transforming it into various forms of product and waste, and then moving on to the next exciting thing as the old processes peak and collapse, or grow too difficult and/or boring, before it all gets to be properly absorbed. All those shells of old coal towns in the US for example, which boomed in the early industrial period, with the mines spitting out tailings and the people spit out and used all the same, the towns drying up into ghost towns after they were no longer useful, especially as oil power came online.
Or the nuke stations, humming away and producing wastes that have to be buried deep underground or otherwise stored, which sometimes re-emerge after geological changes or water infiltration and there's a spill, the consequences of which are usually hardest on the most vulnerable such as native peoples, poor people, and communities of color, whoever for whatever reason gets the least valued land containing these flaws, or whose least valued land becomes acceptable receptacles for wastes.
How exciting are the products and wastes? How far are they taken and transformed from the normal rhythms of nature? And if they can be absorbed on a human timescale, then you do have to take the time and the care to actually incorporate them into what you are doing, or let them re-enter the regular circulations of the natural world. Otherwise it all starts to build up and take useable space, or otherwise conflict with the other forms of life it is incompatible with.
This problem is made much more difficult when you have a world stage full of rival powers pursuing their own objectives, harnessing and developing the flows of global capital in their own ways, constantly juicing the pace and scale of change.
