Is "clean" from the past still "clean" today?

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

I get up in the morning; make myself a cup of coffee. I don’t make my bed, never did. It’s nobody business if my bed is made or not. You don’t like it, don’t look into my bedroom. Nobody will suffer if my bed is not made. I have completely different attitude towards my garbage. My garbage is everybody’s business. The more garbage I produce the less space is there in the landfill for you.

How did it happen that I started to care about garbage? I started to teach Environmental Science class and the more I learned about the problems of today the more changes I made in my every-day life. I started as any teacher who has to teach this course with the balance in an ecosystem, and biomes, and food chain etc. But I got bored too soon because it was the same material I usually teach in Regents Living Environment class. Why should I do the same stuff with a different course? So I changed.

This time I did mention the information my students had learned in other science classes too, but this time I was building on top of what they already knew. Turns out other people concerned with the problems in the environment also made the same changes. You can find textbooks that rearranged the material around human needs for air, water, land, food and energy. This is the way to go. How do we use our land, or air, or water? How do we damage environment to get our needs met? What problems do we face that must be solved in order for the future generations to continue their normal life? This time I didn’t get bored. I learned a lot about today’s problems, more, than I would ever know if I didn’t teach this course.

Most of my learning was happening when I was reading my students projects. They learned and I learned with them. We learned about organic food and organic farming. We learned about the solar panels and the wind mills. We learned about cars that run on water, and the cars that run on compressed air. We learned the three principles of Green Living: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. That still didn’t feel enough. I had to change more.

My students are high school kids. They are almost adults. Many of them work. Many of them are taking some college courses. All of them without exception tell me that they want to recycle. OK. We placed recycling bins all over the school. Now I observe how my environmental science students who want to recycle drop their unfinished food into recycling container instead of garbage, but the empty bottles still go into regular garbage can. What is going on? I don’t understand.

I spoke to our school custodian, wise man, he told me not to worry, it takes time to change the people’s set of mind. We all know how to keep it clean by putting everything into garbage. The fact that it’s not clean at all is not common knowledge. One of my students had an “Aha” moment last week, he said: “So, when we clean we make it [Earth] dirtier!?!?!!!” Our landfills are full and New York is exporting its garbage to other states. Just think about it: we pay our taxes to transport our garbage to other states.

What we have to start doing is: SEPARATE OUR OWN GARBAGE. Nobody can separate your garbage. The custodians will recycle what we separate. It is not in their job description: separate recyclable and reusable from the rest of the garbage to save space in the landfill. No, it is the responsibility of the person who throws the garbage. Stop for a second and think: where should MY garbage go? It turns out this step is the hardest to take. Like the addict’s first step to recovery is to admit that s/he is an addict, our first step to cleaner future is the realization that if we don’t separate our garbage our kids will live on top of a huge landfill.

So here I am every Friday morning with my cup of coffee, a large blue bad of recyclables, and mess in the bedroom :)

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

At that time I was working in microbiology in the former soviet union. We were growing yeast to feed the animals in the farms. The yeast was growing everywhere: in people's lungs, skin, other organs. I got lucky, but I only worked there for 3 years.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Maria, no collective farms nearby and no DDT where I lived in Poland, but we were down the road from an oil refinery (I lived near Plock). They took the horrible smoke belching from the stacks as a sign of progress. It was awful! Although it did make the most bright red sunsets I have ever seen in my life, because of all the particulate matter that was in the air...

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

Yes, I know exactly how it used to be :) good for nature, hard for people :) Unfortunately, at the same time collective farms were using as much DDT as any large American farm did. While the people were going outside to pee (good for nature), the chemicals were spread and nobody really cared.
Now, we do care, but we do not want to go back to the old way of peeing :):):)
Reduce, Reuse and Recycle is not going back it is the way to move forward. This is why kids accept it so well in theory right now. I am sure in a few years majority of them will be practicing saving Earth for the future generations the way only small number of enthusiasts are doing now.

[Laura Gibbs]

Thank you for this blog post, Maria! One thing I wanted to contribute to this important topic is how limited many Americans are in their experience of just what is possible - although we are gifted with great imaginations, so much of what we expect from ourselves and the world is conditioned by our experience, and our experience as American consumers is incredibly wasteful and extravagant, the point of seeming crazy to others - but to us, it's normal, because we are used to it.

I spent a couple years living on a traditional farm in Poland (back in the 1980s, so this was communist Poland, where consumerism was not the frenzied experience we have in the capitalist U.S.) - there was electricity, but no running water (we got all our water by hauling it up from a well, bucket by bucket, which certainly makes you aware of your water consumption!), no indoor plumbing. One hideous day every year, the animal manure - animal AND human - was hauled into wagons and used to fertilize the fields. Eegad, what a stink. But iwas part of what happened every year - that's how the farm survived, as farmers had survived in much the same way there for hundreds of years. The farming was done the very old-fashioned way, with a horse, a plow and lots of human sweat and labor. In a good year, you might have enough money to hire a piece of equipment from the collective farm to use for a few days, but that was never guaranteed (the collective farms were actually quite few and far between; unlike other countries in the communist bloc, the farms in Poland were not collectivized, which was one of the many factors leading Poland to be the first of the Soviet satellites to secure its independence.)

Anyway, one of the many lessons I learned living that way was how it is possible for people to NOT accumulate trash. The only thing that ever went into the "trash" (which was just a little plot of ground, maybe a couple of meters square, out in back of the barn), was broken glass. Other than that, we didn't really accumulate trash. When you bought goods in town, they were wrapped in paper. If they came in some other kind of packaging, you reused the package... because of course you did not buy boxes and boxes of bags and plastic wrap and so on - if you needed something to put something in, you used a container that something else had come in. If a glass bottle broke, it went to the trash because you could not reuse or repair broken glass. But anything else that could be reused or repaired, was OF COURSE reused or repaired. It wasn't a choice. It was a necessity. Instead of being trash, plastic bags were an unexpected treasure - you could use them when you went to the market in town, so that when the tomato lady weighed out your tomatoes, she could then pour them into your open bag (she was in the business of selling tomatoes, not supplying you with containers for them - that was your problem).

In my typical modern American way of life, I guess we probably would fill and overflow that entire little trash plot, which had served the farm for generations, in less than a month. Of course, since the trash plot is not right in our own backyard, we are free to not think about it.

So, while I am optimistic that maybe we can accomplish some change through good will and education, I'm guessing it will be some form of NECESSITY that will finally produce some real change. The people living on the little Polish farms back in the 1980s had not chosen to have a small ecological footprint - it was necessity, not choice, that prompted their actions. I would be all for programs that offer strong economic incentives for people to recycle, and strong economic DISincentives, for households that generate too much trash. I am inclined to recycle; my husband is not - but I know if we were all of a sudden paying real fees for garbage disposal, something that really reflected the long-term cost our society faces because of our insane accumulation of garbage, he might be more motivated to recycle more! :-)