"We encourage you to use your sleeve, or even your neighbor's sleeve... and if there's a spill we can bring you a rag... and if you really REALLY need a napkin we might be able to dig one up for you."
We had napkins. In fact, we used one - perhaps even two - once a week to do a thorough stove-top cleaning. But our well-rehearsed, semi-sarcastic schpeal had an entirely serious message: you will live sustainably while you are here. We hoped, perhaps, that in doing so, guests at Madison Spring Hut in NH's pristine White Mountains would learn to translate these small (yet huge) sacrifices to their luxurious lives at home.
The hut's accumulated trash, napkins included, dug into my hips with every step as I descended the mountain twice a week, creating an all-too-tangible awareness of trash's unyielding ability to build up. Most Americans don't experience such a vivid punishment for their excessive consumption, and so, on they consume.
In rural Honduras (a port stop on my semester at sea), trash piles up in back yards next to whirring washing machines, decrepit shrubs, and makeshift basketball hoops. Local kids kick old crushed milk cartons around and make it a game. They live with their waste everyday. And if Americans were to do the same, every house would be buried. And on we consume, often needlessly. Napkins come and go, whisked away at the end of our driveways, and as aware as I was of my waste on the mountain, I, too, would watch it drive away at the trail head. And such is America's ever-degenerating sickness.
-EMO'N
2 comments:
Stepping lightly on the trail. A metaphor for life, rarely followed.
Wait until oil hits $150 a barrel. Then people will suddenly take it all to heart. They will not want to pay increased taxes to fuel the garbage trucks that visit your driveway weekly. The supply demand metric of the capitalist system is changing.
You are the pioneers.
Americans face the double edged sword of too much space.
Just as a person with a large attic or basement will store his trash as treasure until that last empty Amazon.com box and packing peanuts can no longer be stowed out of sight, so Americans will keep buying and tossing until we run out of empty landfill to pour it into and the cost of doing so hits us in the pocket books as rising gas prices have caused us to rethink how we drive.
Tight quarters in Hong Kong and small spaces for trash cans in our homes and buildings, cause us to live slightly more lightly. Less packaging means fewer trips to empty the trash bin. Fewer Costco sized packages of napkins means we have more space to put our food, dishes and other necessities. Lack of natural resources means that if you don't, others pick trash for monetarily valuable recyclable paper, plastic, glass and metals.
Don is right - it's all about economics, and the inescapable laws of that dismal yet all encompassing science are closing in on us and our culture of consumption.
The invisible hand is moving now, and we all should heed it's direction.
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