[Eco] Don't take out the trash!

[Rebecca Stallings]

 >Voluntary masochism sounds rather insane to me.  Life
 >is filled with enough unpleasantness and suffering as it is.

The thing is, where environmental lifestyle changes are concerned, over 
and over again I've found that the thing that seems like a sacrifice 
very quickly proves to be far superior to what it replaced.  Taking out 
the trash only once a week saves a lot of time, and reducing the amount 
of trash means taking it out is easier when you do do it.  I don't miss 
most of those disposable things I used to use because the reusable 
alternatives are so much nicer: they work better, they feel better, they 
make me feel like I have an established home with all the things I need 
instead of some kind of temporary situation in which everything around 
me is so flimsy it gets ruined in a single use.

 >You sound Catholic!

I'm Episcopalian.  I do not believe that suffering just for the sake of 
suffering accomplishes anything.  I believe that very often things that 
seem inconvenient are in fact opportunities to gain meaning and pleasure 
from life and to improve one's soul.  For example:

 >I think taking fun-looking cloth bags to the store instead of wasting
 >the plastic and paper ones is a pleasant alternative, and can be a form
 >of self-expression, like wearing a cool hat!

You find fun, pleasure, and coolness in that experience.  But you could 
have refused to try it, arguing, "I'd have to remember to take the bags 
with me when I leave the house!  I'd have to wash them every few months! 
  Somebody might look at me funny!  It would be a big hassle!"  I often 
hear people say they can't do X to help the environment because it would 
be too much suffering, when they haven't tried it.

Granted, living with a week's worth of your own garbage is a more 
"extreme" thing to do than using real bags for shopping.  But honestly, 
if it is really so unpleasant, perhaps you should give some thought to 
why it is that you produce such disgusting stuff.

 >> The first effect of this was to motivate us to start a compost heap so
 >> that the vegetable scraps (which were attracting fruitflies) ...
 >>
 >I'm so glad I don't have anyone like this as a housemate!

What, someone who eats vegetables?

We didn't already own an outdoor trashcan, so the question was, should 
we get one?  The first objection raised was that we also didn't own a 
car, so if we were going to get a trashcan, somebody would have to buy 
one at the hardware store down the hill and drag it up the hill, and 
also it would cost money.  The second was that, living in a rowhouse, 
we'd have to put the trashcan either on our front porch or in our small 
back yard, but both of those were places we wanted to hang out, and a 
trashcan would be ugly and smelly.  Somebody would have to wash it out 
periodically, which sounded like just the kind of chore that everyone 
thinks someone else should do, a likely source of household strife.  Was 
there another way we could prevent fruitflies?  Well, the trick was to 
put food scraps somewhere other than the open trashcan.  We could seal 
them up in an empty milk carton, but we didn't drink milk in a volume 
equal to our food scraps.  Thus, we agreed upon the solution of putting 
meat and dairy scraps in a milk carton and making a compost heap for 
everything else.  Taking out the compost was way easier than taking out 
the trash.  We very rarely had trouble with bugs around our compost 
heap, and when we did it was easily resolved by shoveling whatever was 
attracting them (usually melon seeds) into the middle of the pile.

If you already have a trashcan and an unobjectionable place for it, then 
it can be hard to understand where we were coming from.  That's why I 
went to the trouble of typing this out: I lived the first half of my 
life in a very different kind of place than I've lived since, and I'm 
very aware of how much easier a wasteful lifestyle was when my 
surroundings made it seem normal and necessary.
		---'Becca