Seong Im Hong
December 3, 2012
Environmental Egalitarianism?
We learned about NYC’s Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) this week. One thing that was striking about the lesson was the amount of… insatiable greed involved. For example, take the E 91st Street Transfer Station dilemma. The main opponent, Tony Ard, is obviously well off—he has a condo overlooking the East River in Manhattan. I suspect quite a bit of the loudest opponents are also well off as well. Despite that, however, they oppose the E 91st Station for reasons that seem not to go beyond property values. I understand that—nobody wants to have their property value lowered—but at the same time, they are using bad logic to mask their actual reason for protesting. The same logic they employ is silenced, of course, when poor neighborhoods where nobody knows someone who can influence the votes are saddled with waste transfer stations.
This controversy made me think about environmental egalitarianism, and whether it is possible, and how we can pursue it. It is clear that there is a need for environmental social justice. (Another thing I learned from this class: things that seem to not relate at all, like environmental justice and social justice, are in fact very much related.) Like we saw before with the NYT article on Rose Gardener, our society’s way of dealing with waste and other undesirable is to simply ship it off to those far away and less well off.
Which is all fine and good, I suppose, if you look at it as a pure exchange of services (serving as a dump) for money. However, I have to wonder if these people have to suffer the consequences of our action while we, the better off, consume and spend wantonly. The consequences can be as superficial as an ugly landscape (the great pyramid of waste in Tullytown comes to mind) or bad smell. You can write them off as occupational hazard. But there must be other consequences that do not seem so obvious. I wonder if being a “dumping town” limits the possibility of growth for Tullytown. I have no hard data on this, but I have to wonder if this main source of economic stability (being a dump) is actually a double-edged sword in terms of Tullytown’s economy’s sustainability. Given that Tullytown is known to smell because of the landfills, Tullytown must not be as attractive to entrepreneurs who wish to open up businesses in the town. And the landfill is not going anywhere even when Tullytown decides that they want to move forward toward some other form of economy. The landfill (and the low property values and the smell) will stay for years and years. So are we, the suppliers of landfill, actually keeping Tullytown stagnant and dependent on our waste? (Maybe even subjugated?) Is this a form of environmental/economical caste system?
(And I guess you can argue that Tullytown as an entity chose to be dependent on our waste. But what was there before that decision? New York City is a financial superpower compared to Tullytown. Maybe Tullytown was strapped for cash, and NYC made a decision that they couldn’t refuse. And even if Tullytown “chose,” is it right for us to dump waste on them? Besides, the fact that NYC is financially well off enough to ship waste to Tullytown isn’t because of us as individuals. Most of us were born here out of sheer luck. Most of us did nothing to significantly impact NYC’s economy. So why do we get to enjoy being on the better end of environmental inequalities that really comes not from us as a generation or individuals but from centuries of development that we had nothing to do about?)
Green engineering and cradle-to-cradle design should stop the cycle of perpetuating environmental inequalities. But what happens to Tullytown after the waste stops coming?
