Winter
Unpacking & Identity
Knot earrings, Lemonade CD, Thrift Tee, Fossil watch, Toothbrush, Clear backpack, Fundamentals of Ecosystem Science Weathers et al., The Plot Against America, Philip Roth, A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers, Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward, The Double Helix; a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, James D. Watson, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, Lab Girl, Hope Jahren, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel, Flip flops, Galaxy “fun”piece swimsuit, Track warmup pants, Vassar track shirt, Disney drawstring, Princess pencils,
Lacey cream bralette, Reformation shirt, Batteries, Mount Lemon laptop stickers, Track spikes
Unpacking
In January 2017, I opened a note in my phone titled “Shit I’ve Accumulated in 2017” and began to record every physical object that came into my possession over the course of the year. On my list I made a quick note of the item, the reason why I purchased/received/acquired it, whether it was new, used, or somewhere in between, and how much it cost (if I knew). At the time, it was a constant reminder to consider the environmental and social impacts of the things I buy, and served as a spur to try to reduce my overall consumption. I’ve always tried to recycle and reuse items, but 2017 marked the start of seriously considering reducing.
In this project, I explore some of the big issues in environmental justice that cannot be addressed by a lifestyle switch or individual choice, and must instead be addressed by reimagining some of the consumerism we take for granted. I’ve come to more of an awareness of how materials are mined and extracted through pathways set up by colonialism, how manufacturers devour water and carbon and expel toxic pollution that disproportionately affect people of color and residents of the Global South, and while distributors and advertising companies capitalize on women’s (patriarchally enforced and manufactured) insecurities all to make a profit. With this knowledge, it was harder to ignore the very real impacts consumption might have on the lives of others.
My task here is to use my individual data to illuminate some of the bigger issues in environmentalism that a “zero waste lifestyle” obscures. Let me explain: I started this project by inquiring into the zero waste movement and my own role as an environmentalist. And while individual choices are a starting point into environmentalism, they cannot and will not dismantle systems of oppression such as patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy which are to blame for environmental degradation. Not only that, but a zero waste lifestyle offers a one-and-done solution that occludes the labor and resources that goes into “green” products, harming the populations most at risk from environmental degradation.
I didn’t start this list for school, it was part of a personal project to limit my consumption, which was inspired by the zero waste blogger movement in which individuals attempt to change their lifestyle and choose limit their single-use plastic consumption so as to send as little trash as possible to landfill. I found the zero waste movement through the blog Trash is for Tossers. My list of “Shit I Accumulated in 2017,” started as a sort of self-induced guilt trip, but I want it to be more than that. I want to acknowledge that there is no innocent or perfectly correct way to live in this world, but we do have some responsibility to take seriously our ethical relationship with others and with the non-human environment. I don’t want to moralize my actions (even though my color coded graphs with “Green=Good” and “Red=Bad” are a bit on the nose), because that’s not very helpful and in fact can even stall action.
The zero waste movement operates on this same kind of thinking, and shame has been an integral tactic to individual choice-based environmentalisms that seek to inculcate a moral responsibility for the environment. Unfortunately feeling guilty does very little to solve anything, especially something as big as the environmental catastrophe. The itching feeling of guilt is a bodily indicator that something is wrong, but I think this signal often gets misconstrued as I did something wrong. Guilt is a byproduct of a Judeo-Christian morality, but it is a symptom, not a cure. By digging past the discomfort of guilt, one might find an environmental ethics that insists on the importance of our relationships with one another, rather than allowing that bad feeling in and of itself to become the “punishment” for said wrong. I am hesitant to endorse self-flagellation like this because it tends to stop people in their tracks. Shame is not an actionable emotion because the negative feeling becomes punishment enough for any anti-environmental choice. My friends and family sometimes turn to me and confess when they’ve done some environmental “wrong,” like tossing out a plastic water bottle, as if I can absolve them of their sins with a couple Hail Gaias. I’m not claiming to be “zero waste” or “zero” anything for that matter.
While I don’t want this blog to be about shame, I do want to insist that we have an ethical responsibility to maintain and treat well our relationships with other humans and non-human beings. Limiting consumption and waste are a useful baseline for environmental action, but a “zero waste lifestyle” cannot address the complexity of a planetary social and ecological problem. I use each season on this blog to explore several areas of environmentalism that I find particularly important. Overall, the project concerns (my own) consumption under a capitalist economy, but it also seeks to envision a future beyond myself and beyond capitalism, (which I address more in fall) where the onus of sustainability is not a shaming tactic, but a communal shared responsibility to one another and to the nonhuman and nonliving beings that share the planet.
The nerdy, geeky data analysis part of this project comes from my training in ecology. I don’t think my affinity for ecosystem ecology arose by accident. I was raised by Science. With a chemistry professor mother and molecular geneticist father, I learned the scientific method alongside my ABCs. Unlike my parents, though, I’ve always leaned toward Big Picture science like ecosystem ecology, in part because I’m hesitant to perform dissections, microscope slides make me squeamish, and mitochondria bore the hell out of me and in part due to several very influential women professors and mentors in the ecology field. I figured why cut things apart when you could string them together? And why sit in lab when you could hike through the forest in muddy boots to field sites three miles apart? Ecology is science too, and some of it falls into the capital-S category, but I’d like my science to be informed by my feminism as much as the other way around.
Science is incredibly valuable when performed with respect for its subjects, and feminist lessons can be drawn from science as well. We wouldn’t be able to understand many of the pressing impacts of climate change without scientists, and I draw on many peer-reviewed scientific articles in this project. I would like to distinguish between the institution of Science and other sciences and practices. Banu Subramaniam and Angela Willey summarize “Sandra Harding’s distinction between ‘Science’ (capital S) and the world of sciences (lower case s)” in a special edition of Catalyst on “Science Out of Feminist Theory”:
we would like to extend [Harding’s] logic here to other frequently-used terms implicated in this same epistemological re- signifying tension. Thus, when we use the words “Science” or phrases like “the biosciences,” we mean knowledge that is produced through the legitimizing apparatus of various institutions, approved by reviewers and published (or legitimated by patents), i.e., this is “official” knowledge. Someone can produce scientific knowledge in their garage or kitchen, but not “Scientific” knowledge. For the latter, we use “sciences“ — small s, and plural — to mean knowledges that are scientific by all measures except that they are not authenticated by the official apparatus of science. In other words, sciences refers to vast and diverse disciplinary and extra-disciplinary contributions to knowing our worlds.
Problematizing this easy semantic switch, though, Sara Giordano writes, “Simply using a lowercase s and pluralizing “science” does not resolve its relation to the epistemic authority established by capital S Science from its colonial foundation. That is, I argue that the use of lower case plural “sciences” in part remains attached to that epistemic authority.”
Through feminist science studies and my own life experience I’ve learned that capital-S Science is a pretty patriarchal field. Not only is it male-dominated, but the very masculine ideals of rationality and empiricism behind scientific research obscure the ways that research done by humans is often messy, biased, and covered with human fingerprints. This idea is often taken up in feminist science studies, and Myra Hird summarizes a classic example in particle physics known as Particle-Wave Duality in which it is impossible to tell whether electrons propelled through a series of slits act as particles or as waves by building upon the work of feminist theorist Karen Barad, physicist Niels Bohr, and STS theorist Bruno Latour.
Hird explains Bohr’s argument that the resulting uncertainty “is not a measurement problem to be resolved with greater technologically precise instrumentation or more objective observation procedures.” The subject of study always has some sort of unknowability, and scientists’ measurements have more to say about the scientist than they do about the capital-T Truth. For Hird and other feminist science studies theorists such as Barad, this aspect of unknowability, and the inherent relationship between the observer and observed are critically important. Hird builds upon Barad’s term of the “intra-action” of nature and culture by writing, “observer and observed are not inherently static in time or space (to make them so is to exact an agential cut) — they are always already previously intra-acting physical systems.” The idea of treating one’s subject of study as a subject with its own agency rather than a passive object is also important to an environmental ethics which extends agency to all the living and nonliving actors that make up an ecosystem.
I have learned to view my science critically, and to insist on having a real, tangible application that goes beyond mere scientific curiosity. I am influenced by Hird, Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Val Plumwood, and many other feminist thinkers who consider the patriarchal implications of Science as well as seek to forge new understandings of what it means to deal ethically with the non-human environment. Rethinking our current modes of Scientific research and treatment of others (human and otherwise) are not trivial undertakings and have important bearing on how to form an environmental ethics that underscores our responsibility to one another and the environment without reinforcing the classed, patriarchal, and raced aspects involved in an environmental movement interested in shaming individuals into changing their behaviors.
The zero waste movement is interesting through the lenses of environmental ethics and feminist science studies. The trends in gender, race, and class of zero waste advocates are not accidental, and the all-or-nothing stakes of living an environmentally austere and pure lifestyle tend to be pretty inaccessible. I ground my critique in my own messy, trying-my-best, eco-friendly-ish (eco-acquainted?) life because I’ve also learned from my time in the humanities that stories and lived experiences are powerful tools, and that simple language and accessible format are key to getting your point across. I have grappled with many Big Theoretical Thoughts over the course of this project, and I want to stay true to my commitment to accessibility. I will also try not to drag you down into the depths of environmental despair, or at try to least balance that with some fun, nerdy analysis and levity here and there. The topics I discuss are close to my heart, and I want to lean into that emotional, embodied quality and tone because love, joy, and pleasure are increasingly necessary and radical tools to countering the dehumanizing effects of capitalism-induced climate change and environmental catastrophe, an idea expressed by Stacy Alaimo.
Over the course of this project, you’re going to get to know me pretty well. The personal is political as they say. Here’s how this will go: each season will have a sort of “theme” surrounding both the objects I acquired as well as about a broader environmental and/or social issue I find interesting and pertinent. Each season can stand alone, and they are not meant to be read chronologically necessarily as I refer and hyperlink among and between seasons and helpful outside sources, building a web of knowledge that all contributes to a greater understanding of some of the big issues in environmentalism and how they relate to the zero waste movement.
Identity
You can tell a lot about someone based on their stuff. How someone dresses, the books they read, and the items they use all convey meaning to others. In a consumer culture, people often build an identity through the things they choose to purchase. In fact, consumerism is a key tool for identity formation in the United States today, and “within contemporary culture it is utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something.” Creating an “image” or identity by shopping is not something Americans think about too often, and even those who consider themselves “conscious consumers” and only buy “eco-friendly” or “ethical” products, participate in identity formation through the brands they do choose to endorse. The zero waste movement — which grew out of the 1990s move toward more recycling and composting and grew in popularity in the early 2010s thanks to several popular zero waste bloggers — is an extreme example of this sort of “conscious consumerism” in which individuals change their lifestyle in order to reduce the amount of municipal solid waste (MSW), primarily single-use plastic, which they send to landfills, incinerators, or the ocean. The zero waste movement is a manifestation of an identity-based eco-hero politics in which individual choices are framed as the building blocks for changing the world.
Looking at the list above of the things I bought in 2017, you can probably come to some assumptions about some key aspects of my identity in January 2017: a 20-year-old, white, upper-middle-class, junior Environmental Studies major at Vassar College, who runs cross-country and track. Why am I telling you this? Because although identity politics have many failings, and cannot be the sole basis of political claims, the experience I’m going to share with you is in one situated in my own identity. I have been influenced by my class upbringing, my education, the folks I surround myself with, and importantly by structures of power such as capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, which have generally privileged my opportunities and life outcomes. I mention this not to check Political Correctness boxes and hope to use my personal experience to illuminate some big issues in environmentalism.
The zero waste movement and conscious consumerism more generally are interesting topics for exploring the intersection of privilege and oppression, especially given that its very name is based on an all-or-nothing, presence-or-absence, zero-or-nonzero duality that hierarchically places those who “waste not want not” on a higher moral ground than those who do not or cannot afford to live that way. Because the zero waste movement, and liberal environmentalist movements more generally, are populated primarily by people who look like me I want to be clear about what I mean when I say I believe in environmentalism, feminism, anti-capitalism, -racism, -colonialism, and the list goes on. These commitments share a common aim to dismantle binaries and hierarchies that impart power onto certain groups over others, to do more than simply flip or invert (and thereby reinforce) hegemony.
I’ve found a home for my values in environmental justice, which “which not only embrace[s] a synthesis of anti-racism and ecological sustainability but also support anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, gender-justice politics. The Principles also recognize the inherent and cultural worth of nonhuman natures.” Environmentalism isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about white men “discovering” that mountains are pretty and therefore granting mountains the privilege of human protection and conservation. Effective environmental justice is more than just a series of catchphrases that act as liberal political identifiers. Environmental justice is about dismantling systems of oppression which elevate the (white, male) human over “nature,” and it has an implicit dedication to action.
Bringing this back down to Earth a bit, environmentalism has to do with physical, material, things. Some of those things are plants, animals, rivers and bacteria that make up our ecosystem. And some of those things are the waste and pollution which threaten the balance of the others. In terms of my things, I hope to use each season of stuff to help sort through some of the big questions I’ve been mulling over through my college career. I intend to use the objects that came into my possession over the course of 2017 to illuminate the issues ignored by the zero waste movement and to dig into my own relationship with consumerism and sustainability. For me, sustainability is more than just a lifestyle choice or a simple “right or wrong.” Sustainability may be loosely defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. According to Andrew Dobson, in Green Political Thought:
political ecologists will stress that consumption of material goods by over-consuming individuals in ‘advanced industrial countries’ should be reduced; and … that human needs are not best satisfied by continual economic growth as we understand it today. … Greens argue that if there are limits to growth then there are limits to consumption as well. The green movement is therefore faced with the difficulty of simultaneously calling into question a major aspiration of most people — maximizing consumption of material objects — and making its position attractive.
Since I largely fall into Dobson’s category of the Green, I question whether maximizing consumption is “a major aspiration of most people” in the world, but this summary actually aligns pretty well with my understanding of sustainability. Sustainable development thus seems to me a bit of an oxymoron, but we’ll leave that for later. Though this project is in part based on my identity, the issues I address here are far from personal problems. I argue, in fact, that even a zero waste identity can be counterproductive to creating sustainable communities that can exist and thrive beyond capitalism and neoliberalism.
