by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
No folk music collection is complete without the all-time classic 1967 LP, Arlo Guthrie’s debut, the entire first side of which was the 18-minute opus called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” It was a sarcastic and irreverent narrative protesting the Vietnam-era draft, beginning with an innocent attempt to help his friend Alice by hauling her large pile of trash to the city dump, only to find it closed on Thanksgiving. He and a friend finally dumped the pile elsewhere, following others who had used the same spot, only to be arrested and convicted of littering, a criminal record that later rendered him unsuitable for the draft.
Guthrie’s bluesy foot-tapping guitar rhythm made it an instant classic, spawning a movie, annual festivals, follow-up albums and numerous other events. Still regularly played on Thanksgiving, it’s beloved partly because of its length, a saga filled with unimportant and extraneous details that add to its charm. “Massacree” is an old Ozark colloquialism describing an improbable sequence of events that “create great confusion and fuss.” By the time this one ends, one forgets that the entire sordid affair, which resulted from a well-meaning attempt to help friends, turned sour for one simple reason — the landfill was closed.
Guthrie got caught but others had done the same because when there is no place to put the trash, well, people find another place to put the trash. That is the crux of a years-long battle raging in Los Angeles because of yet another misguided dream from California’s environmental industry, to eliminate landfills — just close them down. These activists thought they had the perfect example when the city’s Chiquita Canyon landfill experienced a rare chemical reaction that generated heat deep underground in a retired section, resulting in noxious odors and fumes.
