It’s hard to get rid of what we no longer want. Most Berkshire municipalities have numerous inactive landfills — essentially holes into which we dumped our trash — officially listed by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. For instance, North Adams, Great Barrington and Stockbridge have four each, including some that are privately owned, mostly by businesses. One of Stockbridge’s belongs to the Department of Transportation. Pittsfield has nine. Some have been capped, but most haven’t, and all are subject to disturbance. Although people made do and reused in the past, the amount we throw away has increased since the Industrial Revolution, substantially since World War II and exponentially in the age of plastics. Still, since prehistoric days of the kitchen midden, we have had to get rid of waste from excrement to animal bones. Further, industrial waste, sometimes toxic, was apparently the ineluctable byproduct of our economy. Rivers or dumps near rivers have often been the default solution to the problems, whether for liquid or solid waste. The dyeworks in North Adams colored the Hoosic River. Residents were warned not to leave household waste on its frozen surface, which means they were accustomed to doing so. A river seemed to carry away waste harmlessly, and the land near rivers was regarded as wasteland. Of the seven dumps listed in Williamstown, one is labeled “unconfirmed,” and two labels refer to the same one. Yet, as is true in every Berkshire town, there were and are certainly many others. A few years ago, several of us spent a day at an unlisted one on a tributary to the West Branch of the Green River, digging bottles and rusted cans out of the duff until we realized that they were holding the bank together. If we continued, the river would erode the bank. An annual event has sent members of the South Williamstown Community Association and Hoosic River Watershed Association tippy-toeing into the Green near the Five Corners to pick up shards of glass from a dump listed as first used in 1948. As the river moves, it digs into the trash. The first step the town took to remediate it was the remove a Volkswagen Beetle perched above the river. The most recent landfill, now covered with solar panels like others in Berkshire, was in the gravel pits at a bend of the Hoosic. It has been converted into a transfer station, as have others in Berkshire. Our trash, minus the recyclable content, is now buried in another landfill probably by a river somewhere else. That falls short of being a solution. The Cole Avenue landfill, also listed as the Cole Field landfill, was on Hoosic riverside land made available by Williams College and adjacent to its athletic fields. I remember driving past soccer matches to deposit my bags when I first arrived in town in 1963. The dump was closed in 1973, when the one under the panels was opened. Wells were sunk to check for toxicity, and the trash was covered. But rivers, while handy, have a way of exposing what was thought to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind. A storm last summer dropped a tree and its root ball into the river just where the geotextile cloth protection ended. Since then, a bit of my old trash has been washing into Pownal and Petersburgh in Vermont, I suppose. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is coming up with a fix. It is hard to get rid of what we no longer want. Maybe it would be easier to want less. At least, that’s how it looks from the White Oaks.