The end of November. Sofia, Bulgaria. I should be wearing a sweater underneath a zipped-up parka. A woolen hat, mittens perhaps. It used to snow here in November – a few centimeters, no more, the pleasant foreplay of winter, but enough for all the horned up skiers and snowboarders to start waxing their toys, glancing up occasionally at the white, diaphanous lingerie of nearby Mount Vitosha (2290 m). Instead, dressed in a t-shirt and light cotton pants, I’m stalking through dusty monochromatic fields, interspersed with the lonely Priapi of dry thistle. November 26, 2009. Sunny, no wind, 23°C. I’m sweaty and slightly flustered I didn’t bring any water with me.

I’ve come here to document the illegal disposal of domestic waste and construction debris outside Sofia’s beltway, just south of the city. Sofia may as well be the dirtiest capital in the European Union – loose plastic bags and cigarette butts strewn everywhere, second-hand cars and buses spewing out clouds of jet-black exhaust – but this is only the tip of the garbage heap. Just beyond the city limits, the countryside  is devastated. Anyone who has had the opportunity – if that is the word – to peek out of a porthole on approach to Sofia’s aptly named airport Vrazhdebna (related to the Bulgarian word for “hostility”) has seen the wasteland underneath, gray and lunar, drab villages scattered here and there like the bootprints of an astronaut. “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.” It is a melancholy view, remembering that Bulgaria, a country of only 111,000 sq km huddled in the heart of the Balkans, is – or at least used to be – a true natural jewel, with geographic and climatic diversity that has no rivals on the continent. Promotional videos of the tottering tourist industry still rely on that old grandeur: the sparkling golden halos of the Black Sea beaches, the seven glacial lakes in the Rila massif like a stairway to heaven, the prelapsarian valley of roses where men and women in national dress merrily dance away in the perfumed air. The reality, unfortunately, is much more down-to-earth and equally clichéd. Bulgaria is a country on the brink of environmental disaster. Illegal logging, laissez-faire construction of hotels and condos along the Black Sea coast and the mountain resorts of Rila and Pirin, unchecked contamination of soil and underground waters, lack of adequate waste disposal facilities, poaching of endangered animal species – these are just some of the major environmental problems facing Bulgaria today, and which, though willfully ignored by almost every Bulgarian government in the last twenty years, have been finally taken up by the European Commission. Bulgaria has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

The greatest environmental problem, however, is not environmental. It is mental. Despite the hundreds of folk songs and poems extolling the rugged loveliness of mountains and woods – the sanctuary of Bulgarian guerrillas who fought against Ottoman rule in the 19th century, – despite the pride taken in the natural world – our Little Switzerland, people still like to say – Bulgarians are generally dismissive of environmentalism. Nature is the empty space where one could dispose of all the unnecessaries of life. No man’s land. During Communism every wild spot was a potential site for a new factory or a farming operation. Now, under Capitalism, it is a golf-course or a new ski trail. Or a dumping ground.

History is important here. Perhaps the worst legacy of Communism is, ironically, the collapse of community. Forced to live together in cramped quarters, forced for forty-five years to share a life with strangers they didn’t want to share, Bulgarians could hardly wait to put all that bunk behind them when the system crashed at the end of 1989. The crude centripetal force of totalitarianism had vanished, but there was nothing to replace the center of power. Things started to fall apart. Instead of a new heaven and a new earth, the old world just slowly broke down to pieces, leaving behind… emptiness. Useless nature.

Communism created an aversion among Bulgarians for communal life, for shared space. Unfortunately, the newly-found freedom from the regime translated – mistranslated – into self-imposed imprisonment and the worst sort of capitalist egoism. All post-communist societies experienced some version of that scenario, but the Bulgarian case is particularly tragic. People either left the country (two million out of seven million currently live abroad, including myself) or they simply stopped caring about what happens beyond the walls of their tidy apartments. Soon garbage (of which the new consumer society now had a plentiful supply) started piling up in front of houses, in the street, even in the fields. Why should anyone give a damn about nature, if it doesn’t belong to anyone in particular, if no single person holds its title of property? Nature is shared space, and shared space is totalitarian. Ergo, nature is totalitarian. One day the world will end in a syllogism.

Trash in the fields of Dragalevtzy.

I’m writing all of this as a way of introduction to the photograph here. The beautiful fields that separate Sofia proper from its posh suburb of Dragalevtzy (where my parents, for better or for worse, reside) at the foot of Mount Vitosha are some of the last undeveloped pieces of urban land, home to various kinds of nesting birds, snakes, rodents, hedgehogs, and the occasional fox. But the recent spike in property prices in Dragalevtzy have turned those fields into construction sites or, alternatively, into a convenient dumping ground for construction debris that has now nearly destroyed the ecosystem. I guess my parents’ house, as environmentally friendly as it is meant to be, is also partly responsible for that destruction. It might be guilt that’s driving me to action, a desire to expiate as much as I can for the sins of the new bourgeois, consumerist class to which I also belong. In any case, it is never too late to save the little we have left. And, I believe, it is best to begin with saving our backyards.