Not in My Back Yard (But it's ok in theirs) an Analysis of Environmental Racism

We are surrounded. We find waste everywhere: along the city streets, the highways, the railways; in the industrial areas as well as in residential neighbourhoods; at the mountain peaks and in the woods; in space; in the fields and on the beaches; floating on the surface of the seas, of the lakes and settling on the bottom. It is not possible to overcome dense smog stretches of asphalt and cement, streams of cars, slurry, smelly swamps and much more separates us from uncontaminated lands. To go back to nature we have to look at this destruction even through a network of interests and investments involving which weights upon our lives no less than cement and steel. So, a mountain of waste which we have to absolutely get rid of hangs over our head. But how? Are we supposed to occupy all the space available? Concerning domestic waste the solution is quite easy because once we have moved the waste away from our houses, there is a pick up system, whether efficient or not, which has the official task of “taking the garbage away” and “recycling”. The solutions adopted for the disposal of waste are, however, tricks to escape our senses especially: from our sight and from our sense of smell. Therefore, waste is “buried” in landfill sites; it’s melted down in meteoric waters and in water courses going into the sea; it’s abandoned in external landfills; consigned to the catharsis of fire and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and when it comes to electronic waste, well the story is even more complex. In the near future every community will have to deal with the issue of waste more and more and at the same time communities will be less and less willing to become the garbage disposal of other people’s products leading to the Nimby syndrome (not in my backyard) and in parallel with the removal of waste, legal and often illegal, increasingly distant from the origin. But the problem of waste is not only relative to its disposal. Managing waste means the necessity of a funding plan and plant location. Actually the issue does not come from the lack of finances, not the lack of plants, not even by people opposing its location, however, mostly by the fact that waste is produced; too much waste is produced, even when it could be relatively easy to avoid doing it; plant disposals are planned as well as the site but the solution to the reduction of waste or easy recycling is not. The fact is that disposal plants or waste treatments continue to be necessary and locating it somewhere will be necessary. The question now remains, how and where? In principle, through a plan with the purpose of sharing in the fairest way possible, the polluting loads and so to distribute small plants on the territory uniformly by introducing financial and environmental compensations for the most-struck populations. In 1992, Fast wrote: “The problem of waste basically comes from its material nature. Waste occupies space, it has volume and so it suffocates people besieging from close up. The first image that comes to mind by the concept of garbage is an incumbent mountain that continues to grow and that maybe the better even on the environment of the people”. Let’s try to climb this mountain! We need space: an “empty” space, whether land, water or sky, in order to deposit everything we no longer want to see. According to Heidegger describing emptiness: “The essence of the containing emptiness is collected when offered”. So, will we fill every empty space with our waste? Is this the path to follow?