There’s a lot more literature around about waste reduction these days.  I suppose that’s a good thing.  It’s uniformly framed as an environmental ethic, i.e. ‘being good to the earth’.  I suppose that has to be made clear as well, that we should treat our surroundings with a little respect.  For all of its good sense, it’s not quite hitting the mark, and I’m not sure why.

There’s a poster at Piers’ school that I find to be very funny: it’s a picture of Oscar the Grouch holding a bunch of trash over recycling bins, instructing us to ‘reduce our waste: love the earth.’  I wonder if the designers of this poster took into account that Oscar is a slob.  That he loves and hoards garbage.  I guess it makes a strong statement when some who is a slob and loves crap is making the effort to reduce how much of that crap ends up in landfills, but how are we to position ourselves in relation to Oscar and his request?  Is it a ‘if Oscar can do it, so can you’ thing (likely), or is it a ‘people who recycle are slobs and crap-lovers’ thing (unlikely, but funny to me as an unintended interpretation).  I guess I’m being unfair.

I am actually troubled by this poster in one way, and I think it’s an important one.  Oscar is asking us to reduce our waste in order to help the earth, suggesting that the source of human-created environmental problems is the volume of our waste.

Now, while waste is certainly a problem in Canada (we’re among those countries that waste the most) and our per capita waste amounts are increasing: residential waste to landfills increased 6% between 2004 and 2006, while ‘diversion’ (composting and recycling) remained the same, waste is only a small part of the problem.  It’s the consumption that produces the waste that is the real problem.  If you reduce how much you consume – and what you consume – your waste will decrease as a matter of course.

Other things will happen too.  You’ll have more disposable income – or, better, you’ll find that you won’t need as much money to ‘live’ so you’ll spend less time working.  Suddenly you’ll find that you can spend that extra time relaxing, reading, taking courses, playing with family and friends, napping, meeting your neighbors, making your meals instead of thawing processed ones… really, the life expanding and altering options available when you’re not chasing dollars for false needs are endless.

You’ll be healthier too, since you’ll be eating less processed foods (maybe you’ll have a garden, since you’ll have more time), you’ll be more active (instead of sitting behind a desk or wheel all day long), and you’ll be less stressed (since work and money are the two biggest sources of personal stress and stress in relationships).

Perhaps more to the point, however, is the idea that if we don’t consume as much as we currently do, we’ll go much further in reducing our ‘footprint’ than if we simply reduce our waste.  Current statistics indicate that the average American purchases 53 times more than the average Chinese.  One American’s consumption of resources is equivalent to about 35 Indians.  Or, over a lifetime, an average American will create 13 times as much environmental damage than the average Brazilian.  These statistics are targeted at the American audience, but can very easily be transferred to Canadians.  And they don’t reference cultures that use even less waste and manage to get by just fine, like many Peruvians, Ecuadorians, and just about all of south-east Asia.

We’re consuming more energy, food, and resources than ever before, and we’re doing and spending more to get that stuff to our appliances, plates, and shelves.  We consume many times more water, and we consume many times more space than any other nation or culture.  And if we’ve had something for a little while, we get bored and replace it.

This is all old hat, isn’t it?  Everyone knows this stuff.

But what I’m suggesting here does not fit well (or, um, at all) with the dominant economic models that require persistent growth.  Models of sustainable consumption have been developed, but require substantial modifications to what some researchers call our ‘physical structures’, ‘human structures’, and ‘organizational structures.’  Boy, that’ll have to be another post.

I think the awareness of the need is there.  I think people are tired, tired of the ‘thinness’ of what we are doing (like how Bilbo felt “like butter that has been scraped over too much bread”), with all our hurrying and worrying and chasing after shiny, weightless things.  Maybe with the current financial ‘uncertainty’, more folks will have the opportunity – the sharp ‘break’ that is required – to assess what’s what, choosing I hope to reduce everything.