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These are "smelly days and smelly nights" in Naples.

That may not sound like the title of your typical Italian love song or something that the tourist board would put into their travel brochures but these are interesting times.

It seems that around Christmas they stopped collecting the garbage in Naples because all the local dumps were full and there was no place to put it. This puts a new spin on the Christmas message of no room at the Inn.

With no place to put it, people have reverted to the medieval custom of simply dumping their garbage into the streets. They now have more than 100 tons of putrid, rotting, stinking garbage littering and some would say choking and gagging the city. Rats and other vermin are thriving, enraged neighbors are setting piles of the stuff on fire and it is very reminiscent of the days of The Plague.

Now in case your medieval history is a little rusty, back in those good old days the sanitation standards of the populated regions weren't as developed as they supposedly are today. Sewage ran down ditches along the streets and garbage was often left outside to rot. This meant that there were a lot of rats. The rats carried the bubonic plague or Black Death and fleas on the rats transferred the disease to humans.

Garbage and sewage can cause a lot of other illnesses but the plague was particularly memorably because historians believe that one-third to two-thirds of the population in the affected areas died. Also it wasn't just one outbreak of plague, there were hundreds of them over the course of several hundred years. It took a while for people to realize that sanitation was important and this is a lesson that we are still learning to this day.

The problems in Naples did not suddenly appear overnight; they have been brewing and percolating for decades. The politicians have known they were running out of space for years but they weren't able to come up with a workable solution to deal with it. Also, apparently Naples does little recycling or composting, which just adds to the volume of the problem.

Now, faced with a crisis, the government wanted to reopen an old toxic waste dump to put the garbage in, but local residents have been protesting and blocking the roads to it. People are setting piles of garbage on fire and attacking garbage trucks. The police were called out and have been firing tear gas into the angry crowds.

The army has been sent in to try to clean up the mess. Personally I find this reminiscent of Toronto calling in the army to shovel snow. When all else fails and the local politicians don't know what to do because they have failed to plan adequately, call in the army, just like in medieval times.

Naples is not the only city in the world facing a garbage problem or crisis. Many are, including many Canadian cities. Toronto and most of southern Ontario are in crisis mode and their temporary fix is to ship their garbage hundreds of miles to northern Michigan. Burying garbage in pits in the ground is environmentally short-sighted at the best of times; shipping it hundreds of miles in order to find a place to bury it just adds to the absurdity. Pumping raw sewage into lakes, rivers and the ocean is also wrong and short-sighted, yet a number of Canadian cities do just that.

So it may be smelly days and smelly nights in Naples now but overall the world is becoming a smellier place as humans continue to wrestle with the problems of garbage and sewage, pollution and a constantly changing climate and environment.

Welcome to 2008.

- Walt Humphries is a well-known Yellowknife artist and prospector