Garbage as Art: Raising Environmental Awareness

People who are opposed to the environmentalist movement often sniff that environmentalism is only popular when it is directed toward 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 those sacrifices 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). In fact, recycling offers little or no waste cost savings if not done properly by local governments — it often costs more than it saves once the mechanisms of collection and incineration are put into action, unless the program is implemented correctly. Saving the environment takes hard work, and making mistakes in policy is often necessary before arriving at good policy — just as one must often create many rough drafts before producing a finished work of art.

Using garbage as art reminds us that the environment is often a harsh and ugly place, and that its rewards cannot always be immediately appreciated. Waste and discarding things are part of life. We breathe and take from the environment, and give back 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 that even the more humble and earthy 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 — both in the environment and in the human condition. It is a way to recycle the environment and a way for human beings to personally express their connection to the natural world. It is also 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 rollerblades, which originate in the scrap metal of our recent ancestors, are genuinely new — is a powerful and ultimately destructive illusion.

John Scanlan's poetic musings in On Garbage also stress the humbling nature of waste. All societies are reduced to relics after the death of their 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.