A word before we begin
I have spent my working life at a strange border — the seam where the global economy presses up against the needs of communities it was never designed to serve. I have led economic development for one of the largest and most complex Indigenous nations on the continent, twice. I have built utility-scale solar with neighbors, sat with grassroots organizers across two continents, and spent more than a decade in conservation and community work. Now, as a PhD candidate in Sustainable Development Education, I am doing something that feels less like study and more like remembering.
Because here is what the decades keep teaching me: sustainable development is not a new set of rules to be imposed, but an ancient principle to be rediscovered and adapted. The wisdom to heal our planet and our communities already exists — carried in the knowledge systems of peoples everywhere, waiting to be walked again. My own inheritance names it Hózhǫ́ — to walk in beauty and balance. But you will find its cousins in every language on Earth.
The monster is already inside the house
You may remember an old television spot — a lone figure standing above a fouled landscape, a single tear on his cheek as the world's garbage blows past. It was made half a century ago, and somehow it is more true now than the day it aired.
Back then the litter was a nuisance. Today it is a full-blown monster. The take-make-dispose economy — dig it up, use it once, throw it "away" — has grown into something with a will of its own. And it feeds on exactly the values that hold communities together: reciprocity, responsibility, kinship with the living world.
We see the wounds it leaves. Illegal dumps spilling across sacred ground. Plastic riding the tide onto the most remote shores on the planet. Scarce community money hauled off to distant landfills, never to return. This is not a small thing. It stands in direct opposition to some of the oldest agreements our ancestors ever made with the Earth — the Diné Hózhǫ́, balance; the Andean Ayni, reciprocity; the Lakota Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ, we are all related. Every one of these is a covenant. The monster of waste is the breaking of it.
We come from a long line of monster-slayers
Here is the part the tearful commercial never told you: we were built for exactly this fight.
Reach into almost any people's oldest stories and you will find the same figure — the culture hero who walks out to face the thing that is devouring the world. The Maya Hero Twins, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, descending into the underworld to outwit death itself. The Haudenosaunee Peacemaker, ending generations of war with a single idea carried village to village. My own people carry the Monster-Slayers, who cleared the land so life could continue.
I say this with a smile, but I mean it with my whole chest: if our great-grandparents could defeat the beasts of their age, we can defeat the beast of ours. It is only garbage. It has no teeth we did not give it. And the same qualities that won those old stories — resourcefulness, nerve, the refusal to accept a broken world as final — are still in the blood.
What Cuba's "invento" can teach the world
Want proof this is not mythology? Look at what happens when the modern system simply stops.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost its lifeline almost overnight — fuel, parts, imports, gone. What emerged was not despair but invento: invention born of necessity, a whole society improvising a circular economy because there was no other choice.
They kept the 1950s cars running — for decades — rebuilding, adapting, reusing at a scale the world's engineers said was impossible.
They turned the cities into gardens. Vacant lots became farms. Waste became food. A nation feeding itself from the ground beneath its feet.
Notice what happened. When the dominant, throwaway system failed, the solutions people reached for looked almost exactly like ancestral knowledge — repair, reuse, grow-your-own, keep it in the circle. That is the quiet secret of this whole moment: as the globe shifts, the "new economy" everyone is scrambling toward turns out to be the old economy our grandparents never abandoned. This is the through-line I keep returning to in my books — from Stone Breath to The Council Fire — that the future worth building is one we already know how to live.
The battlefield is our own communities
Let me be plain about what is at stake, because this is not abstract.
The economic wound. Communities everywhere — Indigenous, rural, and transitioning — pay real money to ship their waste "away," bleeding scarce resources to solve a problem they did not create. It is like paying, month after month, for entertainment you never asked for and cannot cancel.
The cultural wound. Poisoned land, water, and air is never only an environmental problem. It is an assault on health, on ceremony, on the integrity of a people. And the burden is not shared evenly — the lands of the marginalized carry a wildly disproportionate share of the world's pollution.
I want to hold two truths at once here. This was done to us — the product of systems imposed from far away. And the answer is already in our hands. Both are real. The first explains the anger. The second is where the work begins.
A warrior's strategy: building the circular future
So what does a monster-slayer actually do on a Monday morning? Here is a blueprint — not for one nation, but adaptable for peoples everywhere, from the desert Southwest to Aotearoa, from the Arctic north to the whole of Turtle Island.
1. Forge new gathering places: the zero-waste hub
Take the dump — the ugliest, most shameful ground in the community — and turn it into the place people are proud to gather. Three fires burn there:
The Repair Café. Elders teaching youth to fix engines, electronics, tools. Skill passed hand to hand, generation to generation — the technical and the sacred braided together, so that nothing valuable, human or mechanical, gets thrown away.
The Swap Shed. A modern potlatch. What one family no longer needs, another receives. Goods circulate instead of ending up in a hole in the ground, and the old economy of generosity comes back to life.
The Composting Center. Food scraps become black, fertile soil for community gardens. The loop closes. What the land gave, returns to the land — exactly as the natural cycles always intended.
2. Change the rules: governance as a tool
Communities that govern themselves hold a lever most people forget they have. Use it.
Champion a Right to Repair. Back your local welders, artisans, and makers with policy that protects their work. This is green employment that stays home — rooted in place, keeping both the wealth and the wisdom inside the community instead of exporting them.
Lead by example. A government's purchasing power is a market-making force. Buy reusable. Source from makers who build with reclaimed materials. When leadership chooses the circular path, it creates the market everyone else can follow.
I have watched governance itself become a tool of renewal — a Local Governance framework taken up by more than a hundred communities, new revenue systems built from scratch, land-leasing models rewritten so that people could finally build on their own ground. Policy is not paperwork. In the right hands it is a monster-slayer's weapon.
Our generation's sacred journey
So I will say what the old commercial could not:
This is more than waste management. This is our generation's sacred journey to reclaim balance — and, in doing it, to reclaim ourselves. To take what the throwaway world called garbage and turn it into resource. To take what it called a problem and turn it into proof of our resilience.
And there is one filter I return to before every decision, the only one that has never failed me: will this make the great-grandchildren whole, or hollow them out? Ship the waste away, and we hollow them. Close the loop, and we make them whole. It is that simple, and that serious.
If you are reading this and the weight of it all feels like too much — hear me. You are not alone; the circle holds. It is not too late. The fire is still lit. And the monster-slayer this age has been waiting for is not a figure from an old story.
It is you.
Tony Skrelunas writes and works at the meeting place of ancient wisdom and the new economy, helping communities and nations transition to more nurturing systems as the globe shifts — from extraction to ownership, keeping wealth and wisdom home. He is the author of Stone Breath, By Lamplight, The Council Fire, and The Far Messengers. He holds an MBA, is a PhD candidate in Sustainable Development Education, has led economic development for one of the continent's largest Indigenous nations, co-founded a utility-scale solar company, and serves as chair of the board of Red Road Journey, translating community success principles into modern leadership. He serves on the Board of Trustees of a private college.
A question for you: How does the monster of waste show up where you live — and which story of resourcefulness, from your own people, still lights the way toward balance?