As to why we now value junk over quality, perhaps it's because the end is nigh, and everyone is caught up in a frenzied rush to get the least for the most, the newest fandangle soonest, the fizzer bang for the buck to take their minds off the fact we've passed every tipping point that matters and are free-falling down the mass-extinction cliff.
You can't take it with you, but this insane consumer society is sure giving it a good try.
That extends to encompass most of our primary industry.
The bulk commodity model is the one farmers have bought into and stubbornly pursue, and they'll ruin the land that should sustain them trying to make more from less and get peanuts for it in following the simplistic "produce more" mantra.
Hardly surprising the OECD's latest 10-year environmental report on New Zealand basically says we are failing, particularly in rising greenhouse gas emissions and declining water quality.
Nor any surprise the National Government immediately denied its policies are at fault - oh, and neither are farms.
What part of the report's statement that we're "reaching environmental limits" do Ministers and their farming mates not understand?
Not to mention selling off rights to explore for oil in places like Lake Te Anau and a large slice of Hawke's Bay. Did no one mention fossil fuels are homicidally culpable?
Sigh.
People tell me to stop writing doom-laden messages, and honestly, I'd really like to. It's my most precious wish: To live in a sane world that has a sustainable future.
But we aren't sane, we humans, are we?
Because we're fully aware, with just a moment's thought, that we're killing our environment faster than you can say poisoned land sea and air; and when it cannot sustain us, we must die, too.
We stolidly keep poisoning, regardless. That's insanity.
Junk defines us. Why do the climate deniers, for example, wave away the enormous weight of incontrovertible evidence by calling it "junk science"?
Because we might not understand climatology, but we all understand junk; we live in and wade through it daily.
Since we intrinsically know that everything we make, no matter how flashy or expensive, is essentially junk, we have no qualms believing science is junk, too. So easy to package truth as a lie.
Resource depletion will catch up with us in the end. But if you subtract greedy consumerism from the equation, we could build things that lasted decades instead of days, and spin out the remaining raw resources long enough, perhaps, for alternatives to arise.
Just as if we made boutique agricultural products we could garner premium niche income on the world's markets. Helping stave off climate catastrophe at the same time.
Too simple, eh? Yeah, go hug a tree. I'm too busy spending my hard-earned income dying.
*Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
