Trashcan Environmentalism

Living in a country other than one’s own, some cultural differences stand out more than others.

Lately, these differences have led to me to spend a lot of time thinking about trash. The streets of Lilongwe are fairly clean compared with Kinshasa or Nairobi - or even New York when I was growing up. But every time I’m on a field trip, driving though Malawi’s beautiful savanna countryside, someone in the vehicle rolls down the window to toss a piece of garbage out. Even my gardener leaves a pile of trash in the back corner of the garden despite the presence of a trash bin not 50 feet away.

I grew up in the coming of age of environmentalism in the US, when global warming still had to be proven and Tom Selleck did primetime specials on using fluorescent lightbulbs. My family had blue recycling bins for newspaper, cans and bottles. We insulated our windows in winter to conserve heat and re-used plastic containers. I cut up soda can ties so when the landfill got washed into the ocean, fish wouldn’t get caught in the plastic. I was green.

Now I live in a country where the principles of environmentalism follow different rules. There is no recycling center in a 500-miles radius but the useful life of any object far exceeds that which is expected in America. Shoes are repaired endlessly and anything that’s not already totally dilapidated is reused. In the case of dilapidation, the parts are consumed for integration into the reuse of other things.

And my carbon footprint? Even harder to say. While the average American’s food travels about 2500 miles from source to table, mine doesn’t come from much farther than a few hundred kilometers - but then I’m on enough long haul flights a year to get shunned by GreenPeace for all eternity.

So what now? I’m turning old wine bottles into glasses and vases. We have a lively vegetable garden. But when I go back to the US, I forget the milk carton doesn’t get lumped in with the rest of the trash. For the moment, I’m going to focus on stopping my teammates from rolling down the window of our gas-guzzling Land Cruiser and tossing their trash onto Malawi’s undeveloped grasslands.

Mapping the war on poverty

Having spent the majority of my adult life on African soil, trips back to the US are full of both nostalgia and contradiction. Visiting my mother’s workplace in the Bronx is one of the most dramatic of these contradictions.

The Bronx is the poorest urban county in the US, even including middle class neighborhoods like Riverdale. The public school where my mother works is just a few short blocks from what was at one point named the most dangerous block in New York. And yet as I drive to pick her up, I can’t help but notice solid brick apartment buildings (some with more charm than others) and clean streets with minimal graffiti. There are no garbage piles or street children begging by the side of the road. The kids walking past look well-dressed and well-fed.

But poverty in America isn’t about bellies bloated with stage 2 malnutrition. It’s about kids who grow up with at least one parent or close relative in prison, kids who are not hungry but survive undernourished on processed foods with no vegetables in sight. They go to a school where the janitor sleeps overnight for fear of being on the streets after dark. Just as children in the Malawian bush can’t imagine the development in Lilongwe, these kids have never seen a cow and don’t know that the bread they eat comes from wheat growing in the rich Midwestern earth. There are check cashing (at high interest) outlets on each corner and Popeye’s fast food where a supermarket might have been.

American poverty is buried under bright new sneakers and digital cable, hidden behind access to credit and fancy cellphones, when in reality, it’s the lack of the cultural capitol needed (like knowing someone who’s attended and completed college) and strong social supports that hinders people from finding a path to the American dream.

While many of the residents of this neighborhood are African, this isn’t Africa. It’s not one of the poorest countries ranked at the bottom of the human development index. Poverty alleviation doesn’t have to be about those living thousands of miles away any more than those living thousands of miles away are all poor. Each corner of the planet is filled with contradiction. Finding a way of out poverty is just as complicated.