About a year ago waste disrupted the way I normally functioned.  This was due to a hurricane flooding my neighborhood and my house.  Because of the flooding and the lack of road service available, there was a lot of trash and waste in front of my house for a while.  Some of it was yard waste as the tree in front of our house had a lot of branches and sticks that fell but we also had to cut down that tree due to fears of instability for the next storm.  There was also a lot of our furniture and things that were on the floor that could not be salvaged. We had to throw away a lot as the water that seeped into our house was dangerous and contained gasoline and other contaminants.  We also had to remove the bottom half of the drywall on all of our walls which also produced a significant amount of trash.  There was simply no service to pick up all of the waste that we had in front of our house and in front of all of our neighbors houses. Our whole neighborhood was affected by the storm as we lived in a low  elevation area.  In an emergency Public Services don’t always work like they should, which is understandable because it’s an emergency and they needed to be more focused on other things, But it was very stressful and messy. It took about a month or two for all of the trash to be removed from in front of our house which just made me worry a bit about pollution and runoff from the items sitting out there for over a month.  it was not very sanitary but most trash isn’t.

Although this example does not have to do with forms of protest or resistance, something that comes to mind is the time of year when large trash is picked up, like furniture and other things that are difficult to transport and dispose of normally. During this time of year, there is a common agreeance that you can go into someone else’s property in order to look through this trash and see what you want. During any other time of year, looking through someone else’s trash is frowned upon, and could result in the property owners being upset, or even calling the police. During the large trash pick up, you often see people driving around in their cars or trucks, stopping outside people’s houses, and digging through the piles of trash. This time of year is when things are the most reused since things that were being thrown out get to have a new chance at life in a new home, reducing the amount these people need to buy, and showing a level of community and care that is not normally present during the rest of the year.

When you are walking through the woods and then all of a sudden you see a soda bottle or a beer can. This disrupts the idea that the woods or nature are somehow a place untouched by man, which can be a very violent idea when you realize the separation that provides. Humans thinking that we are separate from nature allows us to see ourselves as above it, a governing force that can choose to protect or destroy but that is false. People are just as much a part of nature as ever bug and fern no matter how hard we try to distance ourselves. When we see a piece of trash in a seemingly natural space it forces us to confront this idea. This idea of separation isn’t only a human idea it is a colonial one. Native and indigenous people all over the Earth have known that we are all as much a part of nature as everything else. Nature is not above us and we are not above nature. This idea of utopian forests that are untouched by people allows us to ignore the fact that people and nature are equals who have been interacting for thousands of years.  

When thinking about waste disruption, I think of how cities treat homeless people. The dynamic between large cities and their homeless populations is very hostile. The people are treated as waste and are seen as a nuisance to the authorities and the general public. Homeless people “disrupt” the cities in the eyes of city officials. Their presence and relativity to waste and trash make people feel like it is okay to treat them as such. I think of hostile infrastructure and how homelessness is often used as a talking point for city officials. I have often seen politicians say that they will lower homeless rates and “clean up the city”. They claim these things to gain support from people yet they often do nothing about it, or somehow, make the problem worse. This connects to how impactful forms of waste can drastically change an area and shift political movements. 

To be honest I am not sure what exactly this blog post is referring to. I think however, the time that waste got in my way of “normal” was probably during covid. For me I got really depressed and didn’t leave the floor of my room unless it was to go to the bathroom and that was it. I felt like I had lost everything good and trash started to get really bad in my room. It wasn’t for a while that I had a friend come over and like help me feel any sense of normal that I realized the trash in my room was a problem. Now that I was feeling okish, I couldn’t get better because my room was a mess and it made me feel worse. It was a horrible cycle of me trying to clean my room, getting depressed and then giving up. It was just some random day when I did finally clean my entire room, and I don’t know what happened but a switch was hit or something because that really helped me get more normal. 

I think, in general, the waste generated by our out-of-control consumption practices in western society is hidden from us (consumers) because it would function as a disruption of our worldview. The realities of the landfills and dumps that our trash is ending up in would serve as a wake up call to a lot of people regarding the casual nature of our purchasing habits and the negative impacts that they are having on the world. I know that a lot of our (US) waste is actually being exported to foreign countries, with the US paying other countries, such as India, in exchange for us sending out large amounts of our trash to be disposed of in their own landfills. It is sort of an out of sight, out of mind thing for many Americans, I think- including myself to a large extent- where if we can’t see the impacts of our actions, even if we technically know about them, we will not be motivated enough to change our habits. There is a sort of “myth” that we live under in the US, where we don’t see the backgrounds behind the products that we are buying in any way. It appears to a large part of the population as if the life cycle of products begin with the product, in its shiny packaging, in a store or on an online platform, and end the minute we decide to throw it out. The lives and the treatment of the workers who are producing the products, their environmental impacts, and the waste left behind after we are done with them go unnoticed. And I do believe that this is intentional on the parts of the corporations that are producing these things, so that we can continue to go about our lives unbothered by the impacts of consumerism.

Normal does not mean right, it does not mean good. Normal is just the loudest. Normality would have us believe that clothes lose their value as they age, that clothes are useless when ripped, that everything must be bought fresh from the store. Victor Lebow says, “the measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns,” and I think this quote describes our current relationship to clothing. Clothes are a marker of economic class, of culture, of gender. Clothes help to place us in our social order. However, to look at the oceans of clothes in outlet stores, to see whole floors swallowed by them, trash bags piled on street corners and curbside donation bins, to see the amount of clothes bought and then thrown out, is to see the violence of normality. Normality does not serve us, it serves those in power. When confronted with the realities of clothing waste, the power clothing holds starts to slip.

Something functioning ‘normally’ is dependent on the eye of the beholder, it’s on a spectrum. There is no way to acknowledge what ‘normally’ functioning is. Things can just work out to not have anything get in the way but who knows if that is actually normal. There seems to be social constructs that make things more clear when we try to explain why we like clean and nice things. That might not just be social constructs because most people would just say that trash is gross and they would rather not even deal with it, if they had a choice. The waste disposal system has many hiccups that lead to major inconveniences and physical masses of waste in “incorrect” places. I would say that there is a correct place for objects that are owned by people and used most days. There is a chance that all the waste we are creating on this earth that people don’t want anymore is taking up so much space that we don’t care about anymore. They become someone else’s problem or just shoved under the earth’s surface to not have to deal with it anymore. Political and social change can be influenced by environmental protests and/or social movements to gather people to make change.

The brutal mistreatment of homeless people by police forces is such a common thing in our society that connects to ideas of taking up space and a way waste is used to justify aggression. People’s unease around seeing waste in public places is apparent. I think this relates to the way we are allowed to have or not have a certain amount of stuff in public places. Being that the majority of one’s possessions exist in their home impacts the way people operate in public places. Connecting space to gender expectations I think is an interesting starting point. Oftentimes, we see women having external bags to carry their things in public. While in general, women are not allowed to take up as much space as men, therefore I find this kind of ironic. However, maybe this connects to the idea of women being told they need things or relationships with others to be valued. Even in traditional men’s and women’s clothes, women’s clothing always have way smaller or even a lack of pockets. I have always connected this to capitalism and how women are then expected to buy bags, in order to carry even basic things like their phone, wallet, or keys. The things that people are allowed to carry in public spaces are based on context. For example, one might not carry a briefcase to a restaurant but would have it in an office. However, homeless people are really not allowed to have anything in any context. Being that homeless people don’t have any privacy with their belongings, police forces detect that as vulnerability, and therefore feel they have control over their things and personhood. While someone entering another’s home and taking or destroying their things is a criminal offense, and the police are considered to be the saving grace force in that scenario, that same argument does not apply to police entering homeless people’s spaces. Police forces have applied aggression to homeless people and argued that it is because their innate existence is not allowed in public spaces. The face-to-face interaction that the police forces have with the poverty they are systemically perpetuating when engaging with homeless people is different than the “disorder” they claim to be separate from and having to deal with. Overall, the terrible mistreatment of homeless people by police forces connects to ideas of taking up space and who and which objects are allowed to be present in certain contexts.  

I’ve observed around in the Dinning Commons because we have Trash and compost bins, but there aren’t any recycling bins inside. It kind of disrupts me because plastic isn’t decomposable to even have it in the compost bin. There were so many plastic cups, straws, and small sauce containers in it which bothered me a bit.