New York City has shown that it can be forward thinking and revolutionary. PlaNYC contains a list of noble goals with the environment in mind and progress is in full swing. The city’s water treatment system is preventative, revolutionary, green, and smart. It is an elegant environmental and economic solution to the problem of water purity. Hopefully this forward thinking nature can be applied to solid waste management as well.
As it is, the system is extremely inefficient. Garbage must be trucked around the five boroughs, causing traffic and wasting fuel, until it is finally dumped in one neighborhood that has to suffer the smells for the rest of the city. This reminded me of the Hunger Games in which each “district” has a specialty. The people are essentially enslaved and must do the one task that their district is designated for. Is Tullytown, then, the garbage district?
The truth is, there really is not a good place to put trash. Waste is inherently a bad thing. It comes from something useful and, to earn the name waste, is now useless. “Zero-Waste” seeks to break this paradigm and close the loop. Composting and recycling can easily use most of what we consider waste now. Why should we invest in large eyesores of facilities to bury our trash if we can use it? As for poopy diapers, I do not think any form of recycling would utilize those. Maybe cloth is the way to go.
I really enjoyed the mosaic advertisements that Jackie and Joe put together. They were very interesting aesthetically and I think they would do a great job of making tourists aware of why littering is such a big problem. However, I think they have an even better use. Instead of zooming in on the pictures within the monuments and saying that there is a waste problem in our city, the message could be positive. The advertisements could promote zero-waste policies. They would feature these famous monuments and show how, at least in pictures, they can be made of garbage. This can apply to other things as well. For example, a picture of an agricultural field that zooms in to reveal trash being composted.
The case study in Treece was very disturbing. Usually we see environmental problems occur when corporation can simply sweep their pollution under the rug (or more accurately, some body of water). In this case, there were literally toxic monuments to the destruction done in Treece. Neither environmental nor social concerns were considered at all. The result is a ghost town, toxic even to visit, with one unfortunate couple that decided to stay put. It is a little odd that only the Buxby couple could not afford to move. It almost made me wonder if this was a Scooby Doo type scenario in which the couple, seeking solitude, engineered the pollution of the town to drive out all the other people. More likely, they were just mad as hell and were not about to be forced out of their home.
I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore. I really do mean this to some extent. After some time in this class, when I went to vote this year, environmental issues were on my mind. However, the movie this quote comes from, “Network”, has this the other way around. Before action or solutions, it says that there must be anger first. I do not think that anger is necessarily the emotion to incite change, but emotional engagement is necessary. It is not anger, but passion, that will make change.
