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I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.

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and a half after Charles Darwin.

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I wonder if we could begin by, you could explain where we are right now.

We're at a community conservation center in Berkeley, California.

It's a recycling place. Is it also a dump?

No. No, it's not. No, it's not. That's called the transfer station, also known as the dump, and that's down the street. Okay, but they are dumping a lot of things. We just heard all of that glass. They're dumping recyclables. Recycles. Recycles, not trash. The evidence of our throwaway culture is all around us. It produces and it values a superabundance of stuff.

I'm going to look in some of these great big bins here. We have lots and lots of bottles.

And the trucks are coming through, dumping out more things.

Tin can. Oh, my goodness.

Okay, those are more tin cans than I've seen in my entire life. Lots of glass. Despite recycling, we still burn up prodigious amounts of natural resources

to create more of everything. We also discard more of it.

Large appliances over here, old washers and stoves, washing machines,

a half dozen of them. And that gentleman just threw out, looks like part of a computer.

Americans generate nearly 300 million tons of garbage a year. That's almost five pounds of trash

per person per day. But hang on, this episode isn't a screed about how wasteful humans are,

well, at least not directly. It's about how we got to this point, because humans weren't always

materialistic. Our hominid ancestors were nomadic and carried what they needed with them.

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