Editorial 8.1, January 2006, by Deirdre Helfferich Trash and Day-Old Bread The recent news that Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart will no longer allow the Fairbanks Food Bank to pick up old perishable food (indeed, no Wal-Mart store anywhere will allow perishable food past the sell-by date to be given away; they’d rather throw it out) got me thinking about how we view salvage and waste. Western civilization, and American society in particular, is a spendthrift culture. The United States uses more resources per capita than any other nation on earth. We indulge in “conspicuous consumption” as a means of establishing status in our social circle and indeed our country (examples: Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger); even our president exhorts us to consume rather than conserve during time of war. Our leaders look not toward massive investment in technologies that conserve energy or are low-impact, such as solar power, but toward high-impact industries such as nuclear energy or fossil fuels extraction and power generation (and massive PR campaigns to justify this stance). Waste, profligacy—these are things to be avoided. Wal-Mart’s spokeswoman has missed the point when she talks of cash donations. The first sentence of the Fairbanks Community Food Bank’s mission is: “The primary purpose of the Fairbanks Community Food Bank Service, Inc. is to provide food for hungry people and to distribute surplus food that would ordinarily be discarded.” Let me repeat that: “to distribute surplus food that would ordinarily be discarded.” In other words, to rescue food that would otherwise be trash, garbage, raven chow. Their timing on this policy change is really rotten: the middle of the winter, when food donations are needed most and when flexibility for charities is limited. But the ravens will like it. We look with disdain and suspicion on people who scavenge or use leftovers or go dumpster diving, as evidenced here in the Tanana Valley by many of the letters to the editor that appeared in the Fairbanks daily during the infamous “junkyard ordinance” fuss. Other opinions expressed distaste for salvaging, in reaction to a letter by Rodney Guritz, who suggested that good free furniture and other items could be had at the recycle platforms. It’s a peculiar attitude, one that links a virtue, thrift, with low status. Dumpster divers are somehow “untouchables.” Yet dumpster divers and the thrifty do an invaluable service to us all, saving useful items, saving energy and time and care invested by all those who made the things that would otherwise be thrown away—things that should have been given away, but not pitched in the garbage. Sometimes, it isn’t a matter of disdain for the diver, but an issue of control over the fate of the item once it leaves the former owner’s hands. It may be just someone’s unwillingness to let go: they feel they’ve got to bury it at the bottom of a dumpster rather than place it on the recycle platform, or deliberately break a perfectly useful item—just to prevent someone else from owning or using it. An expression of territoriality, you might say. There’s a lot of trash out there already. I ran across a little website recently called “The Trash of Fairbanks” (www.trashoffairbanks.com), with great photos taken on Clean-Up Day, exploring the interrelationship between trash, ravens, and the clean-up. You’ll recognize a few Esteroids on the site if you go there. We don’t have to add to the garbage; we can use our things well, repair them, transform them into something functional. There is a profound spiritual aspect to the finding of treasures in other people’s trash, in reusing what we can, giving it a second chance and allowing it to transcend its imposed trashy nature and become illuminated to the light of New Life Through Recycling. | ||
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