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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...
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.
Rather than a series of seismic breaks of casting off and then beginning again, by acknowledging garbage's possibilities as art, Western society can see that we must use the past again in the future. John Scanlan even suggests that allowing garbage into the light of the day as both beautiful and ugly art may make us more compassionate for the ugly aspects of humanity as well as the harsher aspects of the natural environment: In Chapter 4 he writes: "Our ideas about institutionalizing the aged, psychotic, retarded, and infirm are based on a pattern of thought that we might call the Toilet Assumption -- the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted complexities and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision." (Scanlan 156) Using garbage as art undoes the myth of such visual disappearance that creates the wasteful use and treatment of garbage.
Works Cited
Porter, Richard C. The Economics of Waste. Washington DC: RFF Press, 2002.
Scanlan, John. On Garbage. Reaktion Books, 2005.
Works Cited
Porter, Richard C. The Economics of Waste. Washington DC: RFF Press, 2002.
Scanlan, John. On Garbage. Reaktion Books, 2005.
Much as Porter discovered playthings as a little boy in bottle caps, rather than collecting more and more matchbox cars, for example, remnants of consumerism only to be disposed of in weeks rather than things to be kept as relics of a bygone era, one must begin to see from an early age the slim line of difference between, say a Happy Meal Toy or a bottle cap from
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