i am hoping that this will turn into a longer post. the idea at least. this is the first time i have blogged at school...and i am mildly embarrassed by it and hope none of the cool kids catch me...i am also tired and hungry and putting off my bike ride home...by blogging. although i am going to stop at a not-yet-explored natural food store on the way home and that should be fun.
anyhow, i spend a lot of time thinking about the current ethic of 'disposability' that's pretty pervasive in the u.s. maybe you don't know what i am talking about, so let me explain...
i see it on the streets of boston when people put perfectly good furniture (or maps or electric organs or tables or computers) out on the curb for trash collection. yes, i was warned about this. (portlanders, really...you have never seen anything like this...). maybe the idea is, i'm moving and i don't want to take this with me and it's too hard to take it to good will (maybe you don't have a car) or to post it on craigslist. i know there are a million reasons, but the best is that throwing is out and buying a new one later is the easiest. electronics: upgrading to a new phone...not because your old phone is bad, but because the new one comes with your plan and is just a few dollars more. then we can get into the nitty gritty like throwing away perfectly clean ziplock bags after just one use, or even using a plastic water bottle and recycling it. (hello! it doesn't become another water bottle, it gets turned into a railroad tie or plastic lumber and virgin plastic is still used to make a new bottle.) anyhow, why is this so pervasive? i had a talk with my grandma about it a few christmases ago. she's 80 now, and she grew up on a farm on long island. so, yes, she had it hard and had about zero luxuries as she helped her family raise lots of kids and run a farm. so, for her, these modern conveniences are such a relief and they exist for her use...so she's going to use them because she can and because they are easy. i see that train of thought, it makes sense. but what about those of us who didn't grow up in resource hardship, but rather with all of these modern conveniences. did not enough people watch that episode of sesame street where they show all that footage of waste haulers and the dump to know that all of our trash gets buried in the earth (or burned...)? what makes us so willing to buy and use and dispose (especially before something is even past it's prime) [sidenote, now i remember what brought this to the front of my mind: i went to an economics talk last night and one of the speakers talked about the american ability to always pay that extra $30 to get the upgraded phone with the features you'll never use. he was talking about consumer spending and confidence and how it's coming back, but in small ways. i then came home to find the french-press style travel tea mug (that had been sitting dirty in the sink all week) in the recycling bin. not only was it still full of coffee-grinds...but it wasn't broken. the screened plunger had just come unscrewed from the pusher pole (technical terms, i know) so it may have looked broken...but clearly it wasn't). so i fished it out and fixed it in about 3 seconds and almost considered taking it since it was going to be thrown out anyway...but breathed and put it back in the sink so it could be washed and enter back into the swing of things. anything that is threaded means that it screws into something else...which means it's probably not broken...] which takes me back to my point...what factors make it so easy for us to view everything as disposable? is it because replacement is cheap? because discarding in cheap and easy? or maybe because we don't understand how things are made, what goes into them or how they work...and this lack-of-connectedness makes us less attached? maybe there is no craft and therefore no appreciation? maybe we have devalued everything because it can be made cheaply? or maybe it's something else, maybe it has to do with a certain ethic in our country, something that goes back to our roots as americans...
i passed by this quote in a reading for my history of us agriculture class and it made me pause...maybe our birth as a frontier nation, one that allowed for easy growth is tied into how we operate today. "food production in much of the continental US began, therefore, in a context of labor scarcity that gave rise to wasteful and destructive land-use practices. Thomas Jefferson himself recognized the relative value of land and labor on his farm by refusing to fertilize his land since, "we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old acre." (Gate, 1960: 101) what this is referring to (at the basic level) is that it was cheaper to buy, plow and plant on new (nutrient rich, never been farmed) land instead of paying for labor to fertilize land that had already been used for agriculture and had a depleted nutrient content because of it. fertilizing would mean pasturing animals on the land or collecting and hauling in manure to the 'used' land. and i think that's pretty interesting. sure! it's cheaper to go to payless to buy new shoes instead of fix them...if one is even in touch enough to realize that things like shoes can be fixed (and not just thrown away). a bit of that 'new land is cheaper' idea is in contrast to the european landscape in which every inch of land was already in production, therefore there was no such thing as new land and different steps had to be taken to care for the soil (not that they always were maximized), but you had to do the labor because there was no other land to use.
i wonder how one investigates this further to draw out other historical connections between then and now.
ok, energy regained. headed home by bike.
it's a beautiful day. sunny, but quite brisk.
as i was sure would happen...i would come to terms with the fact that my favorite hat is not going to be sufficient through the winter...since it won't keep my ears cold past october. first frost this morning, tucked into the still-shady clover patches in the arboretum on the morning dog walk (along with an amazing cache of tiny pears i want to put in syrup and can. yummers).
