Don't Lose Hope

Spencer Schillerstrom                                                                                                                                        1/9/15

Blog 4: Don’t Lose Hope

            After spending the better half of the week exploring different waste receiving facilitates and talking with some of their major employees, it reminded me of the hold that business and money have over people. Exploring both the incinerator facility owned by Covanta and the land fill owned by Republic made me realize that waste, with all its negative side-effects, is a source of income that helps people put food on the table. They see trash as a way of life while recycling, in all its greatness, is a threat to their short term personal well-being.

            This new angle on the psychology behind trash got me thinking a little more about why people all around the world don’t recycle more. To many people, recycling is a hassle. It means taking valuable time out of your day to separate waste instead of doing other things. In places like Indiana, people even have to pay extra to do it! If I had absolutely no knowledge on climate change and the impact that waste has on our environment, I would not recycle either. Waste has become a social norm, and the alternative is discouraged in so many different ways that it’s hard to imagine a future where recycling is normal.

            This is the problem I would like to discuss. After many readings and conversations with various environmentalists and environmental workers, it is clear that the public is often considered a volition less machines. In many eyes, everyone is an enemy of one another and the only way to fix the current climate issue is to work on the process instead of the people because they will continue to do only what is the easiest for them. In Coates’s article Wreaking Hobbes on Mankind, he describes this type of approach as the Hobbesian view. The problem with this view, as Coates describes, is that once we begin to lose hope in mankind, progress is almost impossible.

            What the environmental community needs to realize is that people are almost never as bad as they seem. The natural human development balances emotions with reason and passion with self-control. When people act in the Hobbesian way, they don’t feel good about themselves. It is because of this that focusing on process (bin sizes, locations, labels) instead of people is not practical. Just because people do not all fight for the environment does not mean they are not capable of caring. Instead of losing hope in individual action, the movement should work to improve it!

For people like Ed at the landfill facility in Sycamore Ridge, waste is a career and recycling is a threat. Without trash, he would be out of a job. You cannot blame a man for not fighting for the environment when doing so means ruining his way of life. This is why, in my opinion, education and incentivizing the recycling industry should be the focus of the zero waste movement. I truly believe that we can still save our planet, but if we lose hope in mankind and don’t work together, then all hope is lost.