FOR A WASTEFREE SOCIETY
If man wants to have a clean conscience, he must strive for a garbage-free society.
He is nature's guest and should behave accordingly.
A throw-away society must not be accepted.
Man must realise that he himself is the greatest pest that ever wreaked havoc on and devastated this earth.
Man must recede behind his ecological boundaries so that the earth can regenerate.
The vegetation needed millions of years to cover over the slime and toxic matter with a layer of humus, with a layer of vegetation and an oxygen layer so man can live on earth, and this ungrateful man is bringing this very slime and toxic material which was covered over in a long, cosmic endeavour back to the surface. In this way, through the misdeed of irresponsible man, the end of the world becomes the beginning of all time.
We are committing suicide.
Our cities are cancerous tumours.
We are all responsible for our garbage. Garbage should be criminalised. The producers of garbage, the packaging industry, the garbage makers, i.e., all of us, should be severly punished in order to achieve a radical avoidance of garbage.
We don't eat what grows at home, we get our food from far away, from Africa, America, China and New Zealand. We don't keep our shit. Our refuse, our waste, is washed far away. We poison rivers with it, lakes and oceans. Our shit never comes back to our fields, nor to where we get our food from.
We say grace before and after meals. Nobody prays when they shit. We thank God for our daily bread, which comes from the earth. But we don't pray that our shit be retransformed into earth. Refuse is beautiful. Sorting and making new use of refuse is a beautiful and joyous activity.
Written December 18, 1989 using his manifesto „The Sacred Shit - The Shit Culture
Published in:
Austrian magazine AZ, Vienna, January 4, 1990
Rand, Harry: Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Cologne: Taschen, 1991, p. 71, abridged edition 1993 and edition 2003, p. 61
Hundertwasser Architecture. For a More Human Architecture in Harmony with Nature. Cologne: Taschen, 1997, p. 184 and Edition 2007, p. 154
Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, p. 215
Information kit of the Hundertwasser-Path, Fernwärme Wien, Vienna, 2009
Hundertwasser The Green City, Exhibition catalogue, Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016, p. 226 (English/Korean)