plant a tree ...

This quote is from Austrian painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a challenging artist and designer who lived through Nazi Germany and whose work touched on philosophy, environmentalism, design, fashion [and even postage stamps]:

"A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. They should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of their human-substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don't visit a dead man, you visit a living being that was just transformed into a tree. You say, "This is my grandfather, this tree; it is growing well, fantastic." You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt."

The rest of this post was found on this link:

It took millions of years for vegetation to cover the sludge and toxic substances with a layer of humus, a layer of vegetation and a layer of oxygen - so that humans could live on earth.

And now ungrateful humans are bringing the sludge and toxic substances - which have been covered with tedious cosmic effort - back up to the surface.

In this way, through the misdeeds of the irresponsible human species, the end of the world [as we know it] is becoming the beginning of the end for us. We are committing suicide. Our cities are carcinomas.

We don't eat what grows near us - we import food from far away, from Africa, America, China, Chile and New Zealand.

We don't keep our "shit". Our rubbish - and our waste - is flushed far away. We are poisoning rivers, lakes and oceans with it; we transport it to complicated and expensive purification plants, or more rarely to centralized composting facilities. In other cases, our waste is destroyed. The "shit" never returns to our fields as fertilizers and compost, and consequently neither does it return to where our food comes from.

The cycle by which "food becomes shit" is functioning.

The cycle by which "shit becomes food" is broken.

When we flush our toilets - with the conviction that we are performing a hygienic act - we are breaking cosmic laws, because in reality it is a godless act, a sacrilegious gesture of death.

When we go to the toilet, when we lock the door from the inside and flush away our shit, we are trying to put an end to something. What are we ashamed of? What are we afraid of? We repress what happens to our shit, just as we repress death. Perhaps the toilet hole appears to us like the gate to death; we try to get away from it as quickly as possible, forget as quickly as possible about the rottenness and decay. 

However, it is exactly the opposite! It is with "shit" that life first begins and is sustained.

.....

ME:   I buy into this.  All I have to do is look at a few images of what is happening on places like Midway Island or the "Great Pacific Gyre" to know that humans have outlived their usefulness to mother Earth.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed this public toilet for the town Kawakawa, New Zealand.
Photo by Daniel Pietzsch via flickr