Watching Occupy Wall Street protests unfold around the nation, I keep having the same thought. No, it’s not about inequity (I think about that all the time) or wanting a government more responsive to the people (I think about that all the time too). Rather, what I keep thinking about is the waste.
The point of Occupy, to me anyway, is a redistribution of wealth in this country. Thousands of people are dissatisfied with the way our government has run over the last 30 years so they have taken to the streets. This I think is fabulous. (Full disclosure: I have been one of those who have taken to the streets at @OccupyNH). But What I don’t think is fab is all the waste associated with OWS.
Once cleaning crews came into the parks of New York City, Denver, Oakland, Seattle, Boston, and other cities, tents, sleeping bags, food, signs…all that stuff was just thrown away. Dumpsters became full. Trash trucks were brought in to dispose of the items Occupiers brought with them. Libraries were destroyed. All those books and computers were haphazardly tossed in the garbage.
But the Occupiers are resilient so they went out and bought more stuff: more tents. More sleeping bags. More books. More computers. If it wasn’t for the commodity driven society we live in, Occupiers would not be able to go to Target, EMS, REI, Wal-Mart, or any other store to buy off season items. Even if Occupiers shop at local, independently owned stores, those stores are still stocked with items relatively easy to produce.
It makes me wonder if Occupiers, myself included, are really making a difference. Sure, we keep coming back after cops chase us out of our parks with pepper spray, grenades, rubber bullets, and batons, but at what cost? Is there a better way to get our government to respond to us or is taking to the street the one tried and true activity we can relay upon regardless of the amount of wasted food and other commodities?
I have no answers so please let me know your suggestions.
(Cross posted at The Greenists
I do wonder how many of the occupiers bought their gear secondhand; I would bet at least here in Portland it was a pretty high rate. The waste is still a tragedy, to be sure, and having people actually get to keep their stuff would go a long way in avoiding it.
@lupa Agreed, the finger should be pointed at the police state illegally (IMO) taking personal property by force and throwing it into a landfill, than the people trying to replace their stuff afterwards. It saddens me that more people aren’t outraged at the treatment of the protestors. They’re too busy parroting soundbites from the mainstream media making fun of OWS to be outraged at, say, the Oakland police putting an Iraq war veteran in a coma.
Aye, I know that in Canada, regardless of where you set up a dwelling place, they cannot take it down without full notice and due time first. Nor are they allowed to enter any dwelling place without warrant. After due warning without any occupiers within, these places are torn down and burned. This is usually the case as most such places are on crown land/public.
In this case these item were taken (in my understanding) without warrant, and disposed of illegally. That would mean charges should be pressed.
I do agree that the amount of garbage created is atrocious. And Don’t like the idea that people are resupplying from mega corporations either. It is counter active.
A club within each City addressing this topic would be more effective IMO.
HH, I think you hit the nail on the head with this one – it is an issue of waste, both literally and metaphorically. One thing that strikes me is how the protesters themselves are perceived as “waste” in some sense – a waste of space, wasting energy when they should be doing something more productive, etc. The physical waste generated by human bodies all living in one space has continued to be a sanitation issue (or at least, that’s what public officials claim), and then you also have the waste that you mention, when police come and trash an encampment and then all of that stuff winds up in a landfill while occupiers go out to the store (or ask for donations) to replace it.
I wonder, though, if this is actually a good thing about the #Occupy movement. It makes waste visible. Human beings produce waste – that’s how it is. All animals produce waste (and one animal’s waste is another’s feast). Yes, consumerism and commodification is a huge problem in this country, but so often it’s sanitized and streamlined and packaged in pretty paper, and the waste is shuffled off to somewhere else, invisible, kept separate. When waste is isolated and kept out of sight, it can’t be reintegrated into the cycle. It’s easier to ignore the consequences of our actions and the waste they produce. I think in general the #Occupy folks are producing far less waste than someone living in a McMansion, driving a shiny SUV, wearing designer clothes and collecting all the latest tech gadgetry. That person may look clean and shiny and streamline – but only because they’re out-sourcing their waste. I have a lot of respect for the #Occupy movement that they’ve been able to live in community for more than two months now, and have grappled directly with basic problems like how to keep communal public space clean and keep everyone healthy – and also confronted questions like what’s the bare minimum people really need to stay clean and healthy. Maybe they don’t do a great job all the time, and the police raids don’t help – disrupting a nascent ecosystem of any kind is only going to do damage and produce more waste than necessary, since evolving to cope with waste is part of what an ecosystem does. But I’m still generally optimistic.
It’s also brought some awareness to the homeless populations in various cities, give that quite often the Occupy folks are camping down in the same places as the homeless, and there seems to be some collaboration at least here in PDX. So the haves and have nots are brought into even greater focus, and I mourn for any homeless who have had all their possessions swept in a police raid on an Occupy encampment.
I think it would be more effective to make a wiki, forum and clubs in every major city that is dedicated to this movement.
I know at least in Denver, according to some reports I’ve read, some items can be reclaimed at police head quarters though I do not know how they decide what is reclaimable or how.
I am glad I am not the only one who has watched this unfold & thought of the waste. I thought I was being myopic, but it has really bothered me.
Salt Lake City is my hometown, so I have paid more attention to the happenings there. OWS set up in a really rough park that has a very big established homeless population. At least in SLC, the dynamic between the protesters & the long term “homeless” (are they really homeless if the park is their home?) residents was not so friendly. Fights broke out between occupiers & park residents, then someone died from an O.D., blah, blah. So everyone knew they were going to be shut down & it went pretty peacefully, all things considered.
But what kills me is that the city used HEAVY EQUIPMENT to clean it out. They just dozed all those tents, bicycles, the community school, etc. If they didn’t want to give the OWS folks time to move out, couldn’t they at least have just given all that stuff to the park’s homeless? I’m sure they were all standing around watching because they don’t exactly have anywhere else to go.
Disgusting.
Alison has a good point though, humans DO produce an incredible amount of waste & we are so oblivious of it because our infrastructure makes it possible for us to ignore it. Too bad the OWS waste is so often passed off as ‘dirty kids (who should go get jobs) trashing our parks.’
That’s a really interesting perspective. I think there’s a lot of waste at the root of the problems the Occupy movement is trying to address. So many people are wasted in this economy, unemployed, underemployed, trapped in jobs that don’t fully use their talents… So much money is wasted chasing the wrong things…Educations are wasted…
Some of the camps were making their own power with bicycles, and maybe other ways, too. I like that, being the change and pointing the way to a less wasteful future.