It has long been believed that the largest entity brought to Earth by humanity was the Pyramid of the Sun, built in Mexico at the beginning of the Christian era. The gigantic structure occupies nearly thirty million cubic feet of space. In contrast, the Durham Road Landfill outside San Francisco occupies more than seventy million cubic feet of the biosphere. It is indeed a sad monument to the excesses of modern society[Gore 151]. One might assume that such a monstrous pile of garbage is the largest thing ever produced by human hands. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Fresh Kills Landfill, located on Staten Island, is the largest landfill in the world. It has an elevation of 155 feet, an estimated mass of 100 million tons, and a volume of 2.9 billion cubic feet. In total area, this is equivalent to 16,000 baseball fields [Miller 526]. By 2005, when the landfill is scheduled to close, its elevation will reach 505 feet above sea level, making it the highest point on the East Coast from Florida to Maine. At this height, the mound will pose a hazard to air traffic at Newark Airport [Rathje 3-4]. Fresh Kills (Kills comes from the Dutch word for stream) was originally a tidal marsh. In 1948, New York City planner Robert Moses developed a popular project of depositing municipal waste in the swamp until the land level reached sea level. the region anticipated that the marsh would be filled in by 1968. It then planned to develop the area, building homes and attracting light industry. Mayor Impelliteri issued a report titled "The Fresh Kills Landfill Project" in 1951. The report stated, in part, that the undertaking "cannot fail to have a constructive impact on a large area around it." The report concluded by stating: “It is both practical and idealistic” [Rathje 4]. One must understand the irony that Robert Moses was, in his time, considered one of the leading conservationists. His major accomplishments include paved parking lots throughout the New York metropolitan area, paved roads in and out of city parks, and the development of Jones Beach, now the world's most polluted, dirty shoreline. and crowded northeast. In Stewart Udall's book, The Quiet Crisis, the former Interior Secretary praises Moses. Cabinet member JFK calls JonesBeach “an imaginative solution…(the) supreme answer to the pervasive problems of overpopulation” [Udall 163-4]. JFK's introduction to the book contains this disturbing passage: "Each generation must face anew the looters, the rush to use public resources for private profit, and