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‘Trash talks’ highlights dirty truth about waste and consumption
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IN her book “Trash Talks: Revelations in the Rubbish,” philosophy professor Elizabeth V. Spelman confronts something we normally try to avoid: garbage.
Most people don’t give trash much thought after having dumped it, as we generally think of anything discarded as repugnant.
But waste does not disappear and it is threatening the Earth’s ecosystem.
China got a fairly late start to the systematic creation of waste.
There was a time when our ancestors knew better and were more or less satisfied with their ecological niche.
Chuang Tzu (369-286 BC) observed that “When the tailorbird builds her nest in the deep wood, she uses no more than one branch. When the mole drinks at the river, he takes no more than a bellyful.”
That was a time when a life well-spent had little to do with material things — it was more about celebrating what nature has to offer, about thankfulness and frugality.
Life in modern times though has evolved into a rat race and incessant competition for more stuff.
Spelman observes that “humans are prodigious producers of trash and garbage and rubbish and waste.”
When purchasing power becomes a gauge of our worth in society, it means that we take pride in our ability to produce more trash.
In an industrial society, our ability to consume indicates our earning power, which is a vital determiner of our social status.
Although garbage demonstrates our ability to consume excessively, we turn repugnantly from those who sort through trash as despicable scavengers who survive on the fringes of our society.
As the author observes, “The sweepers and haulers of waste and garbage who are treated as disposable are indispensable to the working of their societies.”
We are increasingly confronted with the consequence of our reckless consumption, in the form of landfills that close in on our cities, the plastic bags that get caught on twigs, the islands of trash that form in oceans. Yet GDP — the value of the things we produce — is the most widely-watched gauge of our national well-being.
As the author observes, “A high level of intelligence and ingeniousness in human designers is revealed in our capacity not to prevent waste but to create it.”
The drumbeat for revved-up production makes room for accelerated consumption. In the process, we begin to view those capable of greater consumption as respectable.
In his 1899 classic “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen put forward the concept of “conspicuous leisure” as a variation of “conspicuous consumption.”
It suggests that while others work to earn a living, the truly wealthy feel no such need, and debunks the notion that they have more worthwhile goals than the pursuit of leisure.
Still, it is rewarding to investigate the impulse to dump.
For most of us, dumping has become part and parcel of modern urban life, and this notion has spread to rural residents.
I remember that 40 years ago, in a Chinese village in north Jiangsu, there was virtually no use for waste disposal facilities since nearly all waste in that village was recycled.
We find the villages more “civilized” now that dustbins have sprang up there.
The reflective can see beyond the dustbins.
The writer and fabulist Italo Calvino wrote an essay “La Poubelle Agreee,” which drew upon a time during the 1970s, when he and his family lived in Paris. He observed that taking out his trash in the evening made him glad he didn’t have to deal with the day’s detritus the next morning.
He becomes effectively decoupled from the consequence of consumption.
Looking beyond the dustbins can make us more thoughtful.
While some Chinese are splurging in Japanese shops, some Japanese are subscribing to a minimalist philosophy about living with as few material possessions as possible.
Contrary to popular belief, the minimalist approach frees its believers from the fear of not “keeping up.”
In our eagerness to accumulate and spend, we are not only growing estranged to nature — we are turning against it.
Human beings turn material into garbage after they use it, or after they become dissatisfied with it.
You might initially want or like some object, only to find over time that your interest in it changes — or you change.
A colleague of mine told me that one of his acquaintances once rented a flat where he found over one hundred boxes of shoes ordered from online, many of which were still unpackaged, all left by the previous tenant.
Another colleague said that many years ago, before her wedding, she had sent boxes of belongings to her parents’ home. In the nearly ten years since her marriage, she had almost forgotten about the existence of these things.
And for me, I’m sometimes overcome by remorse when I pick up a book from the shelf and find that it has not been opened since it was acquired 20 or 30 years ago. The satisfaction that I get from most of my books comes from possessing.
Hence the need to revive the saying “waste not, want not,” in admonishing people not to desire that which they do not really need. If you want to be able to have what you really need or desire, then don’t waste your resources.
Having grown estranged to such wisdom, we are losing perspective on what is important.
The cost of waste is staggering.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that people squander about 33 percent of their intended food supply.
Around the world, food is routinely thrown away for not looking good, or not being fresh enough.
“We are relative newcomers to the universe, and sooner or later — we seem to be going out of our way to making it sooner — our species probably will become extinct,” warns the author.
Let’s hope we still have the power to decouple ourselves from the endless cycle of consumption and waste — before it’s too late.
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