Telling on trash

Steve Chasteen played with trash for a living for two and half years and loved it. With a bulldozer as his tool and doing a good job as his motivation, Chasteen built cells of solid waste at Waste Management's Forest View Recycling and Disposal Facility in Kansas City, Kan., at 4800 Kaw Drive. The landfill was built in 1986 and was touted as a state-of-the-art facility. It stretches over 129 acres, 62 of which are permitted for landfill space, along I-70 in a relatively unpopulated area overlooking the meandering Kansas River about a quarter-mile away.

Sitting atop his bulldozer at the landfill, Chasteen was a happy man -- "An idiot savant," he says, laughing. He had a job outdoors. It was skilled labor that paid pretty well. At the end of the day, he felt the satisfaction of seeing what he accomplished. "It's trash, but someone has to dispose of waste in a responsible, safe way," Chasteen says. He believed he was performing a service to the community, to society as a whole.

While moving waste from trash trucks into the cells dug in the ground and covering them with soil, Chasteen thought a lot about the environment. "People don't think much about throwing things into a trash can and setting it once a week on the curb," he says. "Everyone wants their trash taken care of in a safe way. They see trash trucks pick up their trash, or they throw their trash into a trash can at work, and they trust that it is taken care of in a way that is safe for the environment, the wildlife, and for people.

"Nobody wants this stuff to come back and haunt us years from now. But people don't really know or care what happens once it gets into that trash truck. They just have trust. Some people work to reduce the amount of trash they put into a landfill. But even then, once the stuff is picked up, it's just trust."

Little did Chasteen realize that such opinions would cost him his job. It had to do with wastewater runoff and medical waste -- trash Chasteen wasn't supposed to deal with.

Just common sense
Chasteen comes from a place where men and women are taken at their word, where people act reasonably and directly to handle the problems others cause. The 29-year-old grew up on a 3,800-acre farm in central Washington state that his family still owns, near the town of Hannah on the Yakima Indian Reservation. Hard work was a prerequisite for survival in the farm economy. People helped one another; they had to trust one another.

There's a map of Washington on a folding piece of cardboard in Chasteen's basement at his Independence, Mo., home. Standing in front of the window-size map, he looks distant. He runs his finger along rivers and mountain ranges on and near the reservation where he learned to hunt and fish. "On a clear day," he says, his words falling into the map, "you can see Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, and Mount Saint Helens from the farm." He talks about catching trout in mountain streams, catching salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers, and hunting in the hills and vast open spaces of sparsely populated Yakima Valley. But the Snake River is an endangered river, and the salmon are disappearing.

"It's because of these dams," Chasteen says, pointing to the map. "You know, they supposedly get a lot of electrical power from them. But I have toured several of them, and I have never seen them running all the turbines at once. You can't help but think that they can do something better, run a few dams more efficiently, and take out the rest. That's what we need to do. You know, for the health of the river. What benefits nature is going to benefit us in the long run. After all, we are only borrowing this earth for a little while."

Common sense seems to inhabit Chasteen. He's a practical man who exhibits a confidence in his own experience. He says he mixed well with the American Indians who lived on the reservation and that he learned a great deal from them. Chasteen went to the local community college and then to the University of Washington in Seattle to earn a degree in forestry management. But he doesn't look or sound like an Earth Firster. He has worked skilled labor jobs most of his life -- the kind of work people take for granted as they jump in their cars, drive over highways, open and close doors, and turn on lights and water in their homes. Chasteen stands above 6 feet, earning him the nickname "Bull." Despite his size, his movements are deliberate and agile. His goal growing up, he says, was to join the legions of Washington loggers and farmers, and he did both. But logging didn't sit well with his growing concern for the environment. He saw that mechanization was getting rid of forest jobs quicker than was stricter environmental rules.

Still, Chasteen says, "I hated it when someone at the plant (landfill) called me a tree hugger. I believe we need to take care of the environment. Normally, I don't mind being called a tree hugger. But when they called me that out at the plant, it was a slur. Man, that made me mad."