Garbage as Art

Garbage as Art

How can this work on 'garbage as art' be used to raise environmental awareness?

People who are opposed to the environmentalist movement often sniff that environmentalism is popular when it is directed towards saving a cuddly animal species, a hospitable neighborhood park, or the drinking water of children at a local, affluent school. Making hard sacrifices to save the environment for the next generation, even when they do not result in prettier scenery, can indeed be more difficult to sell to the public. Raising environmental awareness is difficult -- for some, even "recycling is a pain that they suffer," an inconvenience rather than a life-sustaining act of community. (Porter 146) And in fact, recycling offers little or no waste cost savings if not done properly by local governments -- often it costs more than it saves, after the mechanisms of collection and incineration are put into action unless the program is implemented properly. Saving the environment takes work, hard work, and making mistakes in policies to achieve good policies -- as one must often create a great many rough drafts before creating a final product of art.

Using garbage as art reminds us that the environment is often a harsh and an ugly place and the rewards cannot always be immediately appreciated, as waste and discarding things is part of life. We breathe and take from the environment, and give out in our breath what can be used by species from the plant kingdom. So long as there is renewal of what is cast off, we need not fear waste. Acknowledging the possibilities of garbage as art shows that neither art nor the natural environment are always beautiful, and even the more humble and earthier aspects of the natural world are equally valid and necessary to cultivate and preserve. Garbage as art is a tangible, immediate way to remind individuals of the possibilities of renewal in the environment and in the human condition, a way to recycle the environment and a way for human beings to personally express their ideas about their connections to the natural environment. It is a way not subject to the whims or budgets of bureaucratic local or federal authorities.

Garbage as art reminds us that nothing, as stated by Richard C. Porter in the poetic metaphor that structures his text, The Economics of Waste is truly lost in the world's ecosystem. "I am proud of the fact that I am 'recycling' waste into economic knowledge and analytical ability." (Porter 6) The idea of garbage as art acknowledges that despite our false perceptions, nothing is truly 'new' in the world. The life of the world is an endless cyclical act of discarding and renewal. The philosophical nature of art can show us that to refuse to recycle and to cling to the false idea that the shiny new tin wheels on our roller blades, that originates in the scrap metal of our recent ancestors, is new is a powerful one.

Scanlan's poetic musings in On Garbage also stress the humbling nature of garbage. All societies are reduced to relics after the death of the civilization. These waste products, such as broken and chipped pots, are now deployed as costly museum attractions. If we are not to bury ourselves in a world with rapidly dwindling space and resources, Scanlan argues, we must grapple with Western culture's mania for discarding things as a way of moving forward. Western culture has denied the natural lifecycle of rebirth, and clung to a false ideal of something beginning from nothing. Ultimately, this false idea of the 'new' creates only more garbage, as when we convince ourselves we are starting anew, and cast off everything from before, we need to produce more to re-start our society. Acknowledging our debt to the past in the form of garbage saves the environmental degradation, of needing to create more landfills, and also can part of the beginning process of integrating the cyclical nature of the environment's cycle into the Western philosophical construct. If we have more respect for the environment and are more connected to its natural rhythms by making art our of garbage, we are less likely as a society to abuse the environment.