Trashed!

A young woman eats her breakfast on the subway platform waiting on the train. She is dressed appropriately for a day at the office; she carefully leans over the tracks to peer down the tunnel. She brings a muffin, some tea and a few white napkins out of her deli bag. The muffin is pulled apart bit by bit as she sips liberally from her tea. Finished, she stuffs the cup, muffin wrapper and dirty napkins back into her paper bag. She then tosses the crumpled lump onto the tracks and peers again for the train.

What is in the mind of person that would eat a meal in public and proceed to drop its wrapping on the street? Why does the subway have a litter problem and not the museum? Why is it that when the real estate is poor there is no compunction to find a trashcan? The answers to how and why a place is ‘trashed’ are answered if we look at the conflicts of social classes and the beliefs about the ownership of these spaces.

The Conflict Theory provides a useful perspective to begin the discussion and I believe points to the solution. Conflict theory originated with Karl Marx, (1818-1883) the German activist and philosopher. Conflict theory divides society into two basic halves, the property owning class (bourgeoisie) and the workers (proletariat). The owning classes make the rules and the working classes follow them. Put another way when a person has ownership they behave one way and when they do not have ownership they behave in another.

Those owning a place have interest in its appearance and how it is used. One needn’t actually possess the item to have this interest. One need only believe in one’s ownership, however small. When even this little bit of ownership is not seen as valuable the environment suffers. Nobody would flick a cigarette butt into a corner of their living room or throw gum on the floor of their bathroom. I think that a belief in ownership is the key to ending litter.

Can we make everyone an owner with interest in the environment? If the young woman felt in possession of the subway platform she may not have littered. Why didn’t she feel any ownership here? Because she doesn’t believe she has any influence on it. She does, but she’s likely never exercised it.

Again and again others like the Straphangers or the MTA themselves have sent out mail, made calls and passed out literature to acquire accurate public opinion. Public service announcements, posters and commercials are aimed at this person.

How can she litter? Because she believes that ownership takes something from her.

We can continue to go down this path of ownership, but what we’re ultimately left with is changing minds about what influence they possess. We live, work, and pays taxes for these services. This young woman is influential, but she doesn’t believe it.

Most of us are familiar with the Broken Window Theory from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book The Tipping Point in which he links increases in crime to the environment in which they occur. When enough graffiti and litter are present it can create a tipping point where a person who didn’t usually litter is willing to break the law. This theory only works when we’re speaking about areas where economically disadvantaged citizens congregate.

What must happen to create a tipping point in which littering is unthinkable? Wall Street has arguably more devastating crime, but there are no graffiti sprayed halls and litter strewn corners. There are no broken windows to fix, graffiti to remove or even much litter to pick up. The proletariat of the financial district of New York City is very proud of this fact.

Pride, I would argue, is a characteristic of ownership. Our subway woman is not proud of her place, literally and metaphorically. What can we fix for this gal to get the biggest impact? Litter is a social problem that can be understood when we look at the conflict of social status and the value placed on the immediate physical environment of the persons who inhabit that environment. When ownership can be felt as shared, and this sharing has influence and value, change occurs rapidly.

Can we value public places that have different inherent and incomparable functions equally? When everyone has esteem in their neighborhoods and public places there will be no trash to sully their enjoyment. But littering and its impact on one’s own neighborhood is where this idea must begin and can be most effectively taught.

If we are to address the problem on litter as a whole we must continue to expand our gaze. We start with our own broken windows. We begin in our backyards. This enlightened gaze of ownership of one’s surroundings soon takes over our public spaces and eventually our national regions and even our planet. The place we occupy in society according to Karl Marx’s analysis will like determine if we ever get out of our own backyards.

The Great Garbage Patch is a swirling sea of debris comprised mostly of plastic litter. The litter came from boats that dumped their trash directly into the ocean, but also rivers that brought the trash to the sea. There is no life in the Pacific Gyre and there is currently no effort underway by any government to deal with this swirling heap of a trillion tiny acts of misbehavior.

The tipping point here is the same as the woman on our subway platform tossing her breakfast bag into a corner. Can we make the evolutionary jump and turn Karl Marx’s philosophy on its proverbial head? Can we evolve from the proletariat to the owning class of the bourgeoisie? Our ocean must be seen as belonging to all of us and it must become our responsibility and fall under our collective care as much as our parks and front lawns. We will get out and pick up the trash and garbage that accumulates on our patch of grass, but want someone else to pick up our parks and our filter our oceans.

The tipping point will come when each of sees our own behavior as contributing to this vortex of trash. The oceans are our back yards and can be seen as our gardens at least as much as our farms are.

Where is that tipping point?

I believe that there are several areas ripe for changing this dilemma. I believe education about what exactly litter is and what costs it brings to a community are crucial. Most of us know that plastic takes a very long time to decompose yet do not think twice about not recycling a soda bottle. Here in New York, when you buy a soda bottle, you pay an extra five cents to clean it up. These bottles can be gathered up and sold to recycling centers. Many of the homeless in our community are the largest recyclers.

Styrofoam is still manufactured when we know that it takes over a million years to degrade. Most of the searchable studies show that the average person who litters is male, between 16 and 24 and smokes. This should be a population that can be reached. If we can tip this fellow we’ll have a way of doing real damage to landfills. Smoking rates are continuing to go down. Education was the key to turning youth tobacco use around. So there is hope that littering will reach a similar tipping point.

Every morning I grab a plastic bag from under the sink and walk to the subway. I don’t always pick anything up, but I have the means to. I can be seen on the platforms of the New York Subways picking up after my fellow straphangers because I believe that is the best response to what I now know. I throw away the trash and I recycle what I can. Sometimes people will actually offer to put their trash in my bag. Sometimes they will help; it’s usually a child making a game of picking up after adults. Sometimes I am thanked or complimented; it’s usually an old woman.

I’m not going to wait for anyone else to lend a hand at tipping this issue. I’m doing my part to approach the tipping point.

This issue is fraught with paradox. On one hand we must all be seen as owners of this planet and all our individual environments for sustainable change to happen. For this ownership to occur we must educate those that feel the least ownership, young people especially post puberty and pre-adult males. Teach the young that they own more of the earth than we do. When that is exactly the opposite of what it looks like.

We must act like the proletariat, working for the good of all, while believing we are the bourgeoisie, so we can behave as good stewards. We live on one planet and it contains enough food and shelter for millions more than currently occupy it if we can learn to live and teach these paradoxes.

A young woman ate her breakfast on the subway platform waiting for the train. When she finished her muffin she wiped away the crumbs with her handkerchief. She replaced the lid on her thermos cup and put it in her tote. She leaned out over the tracks to see if she could see the train coming. When there was no train she pulled a book from her tote and read in the pleasant space until the subway arrived.