This article was published on thetimes-tribune.com
“Hi and Lois” debuted in 1954 and quickly joined its sister strip “Beetle Bailey” as a mainstay in the Sunday Comics sections of newspapers. Both were created by the late, great Mort Walker and Dik Browne, whose descendants still produce the strips.
It’s quite a legacy. Hi and Lois Flagston have been icons of the American middle class for 70 years, but their familiar feats and foibles remain relatable to contemporary audiences. A handful of subscribers said so in their reactions to the “Hi and Lois” strip published in last week’s Sunday Times.
In the first panel, Hi is greeted in the early dawn by a garbage man, who proclaims, “The measure of a great civilization is what it leaves behind.”
Over the next three panels, he offers illustrated examples: “The Egyptians left the Pyramids. The Romans left the Colosseum. The Chinese left the Great Wall.”
“What will we leave?” Hi asks in the last panel as the garbage man lugs his bags to the truck.
“Landfills,” he replies.
Get it? Pat Clark did.
“I don’t want to laugh at it, but I guess it’s funny,” the co-founder of Friends of Lackawanna said Tuesday. “This comic is an indictment of how disposable we see so many things in our society, and there’s no question this thing is already our legacy.”
“This thing,” of course, is Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop, poised to rise as an Everest of mostly out-of-state trash over the next half-century thanks to an unconscionable expansion granted by the alleged state Department of Environmental Protection.
In Our Stiff Neck of the Woods, the sights and scents of spring include garbage trucks, swirling squadrons of garbage gulls and Eau de Newark. The “Hi and Lois” strip from Sunday bloomed in time to remind us living in the growing shadow of Mount Trashmore the existential threat it poses to the region’s health, wealth and future prospects.
“The bigger this thing grows, the more likely it is going to be to drive away any desire to start companies here, to relocate families here in the future,” Pat said, “because that will be the dominant first thing anyone will think of, and reputation and brand matters.”
This is the 10th spring of Friends of Lackawanna’s campaign to block Keystone’s expansion, which is impressive considering most considered the effort doomed from the jump. Landfill owners Louis and Dominick DeNaples are used to government working for them, but FOL has had remarkable success using the process to the public’s advantage.
The next step comes next month, when the Environmental Hearing Board finally hears FOL’s case against the expansion on April 22 in Harrisburg.
“I feel really good about it,” Pat said of FOL’s chances. “You have to be a little optimistic to go into this endeavor and stick with it as long as we have.”
When FOL filed its appeal in 2017, the EHB agreed that DEP hadn’t done its job monitoring the landfill, but said the lack of documentation of problems and violations was a barrier to the board getting involved, Pat explained.
Since hundreds of documented odor complaints and serious questions about leachate control and Keystone’s plans to manage gave DEP a much more robust appetite for environmental protection, he said FOL is going to court in April with precisely the sort of evidence EHB said was necessary.
“That was our first go-around with the EHB,” Pat said. “Since then, there have been essentially nonstop documented violations between storage to groundwater contamination to odors. So now the file is full of violations documented by DEP.”
Even if Keystone smelled like spring roses and posed no environmental or public health threats, it’s still a landfill crouched in the heart of two host communities and a region that deserves a better legacy. It doesn’t belong where it is. That’s it’s already there is no reason to pile it higher.
“We’ve always struggled with that idea,” Pat said. “Our stance is not a NIMBY stance. We understand that society makes garbage and unfortunately, landfills are part of our way of life. Our position has been that at some point, a landfill gets so big, and the risk gets so concentrated, that it is negligent to allow them to keep growing in size and scope, especially when it’s in the middle of communities.”
Public attitudes toward Keystone changed over the past decade, Pat said. Where neighbors were once resigned to the landfill’s presence and continued growth, more and more are refusing to be dumped on in perpetuity.
“If you go back to our first conversation 10 years ago and you were like, ‘Are you sure the public is going to be OK with opposing this?’” Pat said. “We’ve gotten overwhelming public support because the landfill is negatively impacting people’s lives on a regular basis.
“Maybe it wasn’t 10 years ago because the smells weren’t as bad, for example, but what happened is what we warned about — they got worse as it got bigger.”
Hundreds of odor complaints proved too many for DEP to ignore. If “Hi and Lois” lived in Our Stiff Neck of the Woods, they’d have another panel for the garbage man, but you couldn’t print it in a family newspaper.
“People are (filing odor complaints) because they know what it is, what’s causing it and they’re not afraid to stand up when things aren’t going well. That’s a good sign.”
See you in the funny pages.
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