Climate ethics, Plastic-free July, and the radical activism movement
3 Things to Get Curious About this week
Hello, earthlings. This week I have a few questions I'm ruminating on:
Plastic Free July - Have you checked your privilege and your mental health lately?
We're almost half-way through July, and that means half-way through Plastic Free July!
I have mixed feelings about this movement, for a few reasons.
While I acknowledge my impact as an individual consumer and believe that the Plastic Free July movement is a great way to educate and empower people to act, I also think that the ability to be plastic-free depends largely on one's privilege and what economic options are available to them. i.e. my monthly salary allows me to forego purchasing soap and shampoo in sachet packets, pick plastic free options, or buy in bulk, but daily wagers don't have the same privilege.
Facing each day with the conundrum of dealing with plastic, and single-use plastic, here in the Philippines, has not been very good on my mental health (cue: eco-anxiety triggers). Every day I face the practical but also moral conundrum of deciding whether and how to segregate my personal waste at home; waste that twice a week, gets picked up by garbage truck only to be dumped into a single un-categorized pile of waste that will go to the landfill.
However, in the spirit of the month, here's a personal/home product I've switched out this year:
changed my deodorant from the store-bought plastic encased ones to an all-natural option that would last longer i.e. less waste to throw out (I started out with Coconut Matter - one small bar lasted me 3 months, and now am trying out nuud - comes in super small tubes made of bioplastic sugarcane and only have to re-apply these every 3-4 days)
And habits I’ve tried to nurture over the years:
refusing the plastic vacuum wrap when I buy produce at supermarkets - seriously have never understood this practice and it just makes all your vegetables look suffocated
(this one's been the toughest so far) - fighting the urge to buy more reusable bottles! I have 2 large ones for water and a smaller one for my coffee drinks - and that may be one too much already!
started using a menstrual cup in 2018 and haven't looked back since
In any case, it’s always good to remember that:
"There is no such thing as away. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere." - Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff
Climate ethics - are we complicit in worsening climate change and pollution?
Dean Walraff, author of Climate Ethics for the Anthropocene Era, recently wrote about complicity on his substack, and it made me reflect about my own complicity in the plastic/ solid waste problem.
He desribes complicity as a spectrum, "from directly supporting something bad, to participating in an organization or movement that somehow provides indirect support."
In the neighborhood where I live, our solid waste management system is a joke (as it probably also is for most of my Filipino peers here). I would like to be able to segregate and dispose of various types of waste properly; recycling ones that can be recycled and only sending to landfill those that absolutely need to be.
But the reality is that I have boxes of bottles going back many months because there is no recycler anywhere near me. My husband and I have also started storing old batteries in used bottles because we don’t want to throw it where it won’t be treated properly. This is because our garbage collectors don’t discriminate between types of waste, except for waste that goes to landfill, and “organic” waste (debris from trees, leaves, etc that are collected separately).
I know that because I know better, I should be complaining to the village administration. Or at least be more active in the association meetings so that we can campaign for better services. (Our city government announced a few years ago that they were putting up their own materials recovery facility and hazardous waste treatment center, but I haven’t seen how this has been implemented yet at the barangay level). And honestly, I simply do not have the energy or time to nose it out. I suppose this makes me complicit to the continued pollution and mismanagement of waste in my community.
As Dean writes, we are all complicit in one way or another, simply by being and living and interacting as human beings, citizens, etc. and the most that we can do is to consider how our actions (and non-action) affects others, and try to do better.
What are ways that you think you are complicit in climate change, and how might you resolve to be a little less so?
Lastly,
Increasing radicalism of the climate protest movement - yay or nay?
Reminiscing about my current low levels of energy to be actively protesting waste mis-management within my own community also makes me think about recent reports of climate protesters and their most recent approach to getting attention - vandalism.
On one hand, I'm amazed at all the trouble they go to to create/ instigate these acts - the one where protesters in Spain plugged holes on golf courses and planted seedlings as a protest to the worsening water situation has been my favorite so far because for me it made sense to show what could be done with the space instead of totally destroying it, and they proved their point.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure about how effective these more radical acts are for the entire climate action movement, e.g. spilling oil on the Trevi fountain in Rome, as I do feel they are turning off more people instead engaging polluters to act.
What are your thoughts on this? Yay or nay? How might we better activate our youth for climate justice?
COMING UP NEXT…
For Philippine / ASEAN based readers, the BSP (Philippine central bank) recently released it's first Sustainability Report. I'll be breaking it down for you in a post later this week, so watch out for it. It will go directly to your inbox, so please subscribe to make sure you receive it!