TV Tom, I am totally with 'Becca on this one,
I also do not take the trash out until collection day. And
some times I even miss collection day and it is no big deal
to wait another week. We are only 2 people living in our
house, though. So I do not consider it a big feat (perhaps a
little one).
We just do not produce that much trash because we compost, we
recycle and we are mostly vegetarian. I love it! I do not
feel like I am making any sacrifice, on the contrary, I
derive pleasure from it.
'Becca, we could start another conversation on cloth diapers
and washing machines... I want more details, please?
Luisa
--On 2/17/07 11:21 PM -0500 Rebecca Stallings
<becca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>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
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