Hard to comprehend the horrendousness

There are a lot of bad environmental things happening in this world at present. It can boggle my mind.  Just this week, as the climate change conference was wrapping up, there were reports about a river in India, the Yamuna, a tributary of the Ganges, nearly covered with toxic pollutant foam.  And because it's a sacred river, many citizens are bathing and wading in it, despite the danger.  

And then there's this.

Outside of Iquique, Chile (a port city), in the otherwise pristine and skeleton-dry Atacama Desert, there's a massive mountain of discarded clothing. 

It is "leftovers" from the fashion trade, items that either didn't fit or didn't sell. And it's piling up a lot faster than it can be turned into insulation.

I did a quick look with Google Maps and it's not surprising that the satellite view can apparently detect them.

Here's another view of what they look like.  The fashion trash is piled on either side of a dirt road.

So here's a satellite view showing where Iquique is on the Chilean coast.  (It's almost due west of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni salt playa, by the way.)   The small gray pin at mid-picture right is where the final zoomed-in view looks.

Now, zooming in:  (click on this image for a larger shot)

It looks like there's some piled on either side of the paved road at left, and then the mottled area at righ has a main road through it, which one would guess is where the trash trucks drive before they dump their load of shirts, pants, shoes, sweats, socks, and underwear.  

It's a sad state of affairs the world is in, isn't it?