Picking Up The Trash - By Perry J. Greenbaum

One of the greatest advances of humanity is the development of technology, which has advanced humanity in great ways. Most notable of these are the many advances in medicine in the last 100 years, each advance building on previous discoveries. Such is a good thing and has increased the health and wellness of humanity in general.

Sometimes, however, we have to consider more pedestrian matters, things that often escape our view. Consider the trash that humans make; someone has to pick it up, recycle it and dispose the rest. There is an interesting article (“Out of India’s Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity”; June 12, 2013), by Sarika Bansal, in the New York Times on how things work in India, which provides work and dignity to a lower-class of individuals and helps sustain the planet.

Bansal writes:

Trash! Trash!” yelled Chandani Nagtilak as she pushed her cart through a residential complex. An older woman put two bins on her porch steps and exchanged pleasantries in the local language, Marathi. Chandani took the bins to her pushcart, where she and her colleague Rekha Shinde emptied them and began separating the contents into organic, recyclable and nonrecyclable waste.

Chandani wore a magenta sari under her uniform, a dark blue button-down shirt. Earlier that morning, she had eaten a rich breakfast of poha and halwa, washed her hands with soap, and complained to her friends that her teenage son would rather gossip than study. This is significant. 

For many years, Chandani couldn’t count on eating a good breakfast, washing with soap or rolling a pushcart. For more than 20 years, she has been a waste-picker in Pune (pronounced POO-nay), a city of six million. During most of that time, she dressed in tattered clothes and hauled a back-aching bag as she fought off dogs while scouring for recyclables at a landfill. She sometimes went without meals. She sustained injuries. Most hurtful, people often refused to make eye contact with her — except to call her a thief or a piece of trash.

“Now people offer me tea when I go to their houses,” said Chandani, beaming. That’s because her work has been formalized and people have come to appreciate the value of her services. In addition, waste management, recycling and composting are increasingly coming to be seen as vital to community health, environmental sustainability and quality of life around the world.

Indeed they are. This is the type of win-win situation that betters the human condition. One can argue about the unofficial caste system in place in India, but change can only happen incrementally. India’s caste system, which dates to the third century BCE, divides society into four classes, with the Brahmins on top and the Dalits on the bottom. In its purest form the caste system is rigid and inflexible, dictating occupation, social status and family life. [For more information, see here.]

Traditionally, individuals stay within their caste for life, marrying within their own socio-economic group. Dalits, who are on the bottom of India’s hierarchical structure, form about 16 per cent of India’s population; these individuals are the trash collectors. Although India’s government has assiduously tried to get rid of this system, it remains in the 21st century. We in the west might want to withhold our judgment about India's societal structures. Sometimes, things are not what they appear to be, and more facts need be considered.

Consider what Shikha Dahmia writes in Reason (“The Tragic Truth About India’s Caste System”; January 24, 2012).

But there is an even more tragic explanation that I discovered during a recent visit to New Delhi while talking to Maya, the dalit or untouchable—the lowest of the four castes—who has serviced my family for 35 years. Maya herself clings to her caste because it offers her the best possible life, even in modern India.

The puzzling thing about the caste system is that it has endured without any legal force backing it. Unlike slavery, under which whites actively relied on authorities to maintain their slave holdings, the caste system is an informal, self-perpetuating institution that has resisted half-a-century worth of (ham-handed) government efforts to eradicate it.

When individuals take on tasks, such as trash collection and separation that few want to do, they need be looked at as people who are doing a good public service, as is the case in Pune, India. Sustainability is becoming more important world-wide, as it ought to be, and the more unique and original ways we look at the issue the better.

Each nation and each culture has its own understanding of what sustainability means; and the beauty of our inter-connectedness, helped by telecommunication technologies, is that we can discuss, share and learn from each other the best ways to progress. And that’s important to the betterment of all humanity.

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Perry J, Greenbaum is a Toronto-based writer; he has been writing professionally since 1996. Previous to this he worked as an engineer in the aerospace and defense sector.  His writing reflects in his interests in human rights, individual liberties and in bettering the human condition. Sustainability and conservation falls within this view. 

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Copyright ©2013. Perry J. Greenbaum All Rights Reserved. This essay originally posted at Perry J. Greenbaum (June 15, 2013). It is republished here with the permission of the author.

If you would like to read more by Perry, please visit: http://perryjgreenbaum.blogspot.com/

Sabali, Patience.

Here we are. In the only world we’ve ever known; in the one and only precious life we were given to exist in this world. This one is for the people.

Scientists, doctors, psychologists, and experts; everyone wants to tell me what makes me healthy, what makes me happy. Everyone shakes the trees and waiting for the fruit to fall; everyone has a stake in the matter and everyone has their two cents in the story told. Everyone including me has a mind of our own, but where do we think we have original thoughts?

So I read, I listened, I sang the songs I don’t know because this one is for the people. I try to live in healthy ways, following the sage advice freely printed on pages so cheap that cost children their lives. I live happily, ignorant of the facts to be sold.

But the experts still can’t tell me how to save my soul, how to ignore the savages in villages, how to mask the living images of ribs of the little kids and dead body turn cold.

I hold my breath, my lips turned blue; I hold my pulse, my heart grows old.

I eat what the two dollar nutrition books tell me is good for my muscles; I drink water polluted with plastic bottles. I breathe the air from smoke stacks so build for the florescence lights in my home. I sank my feet into the ground so saturated with GMOs. I smile because anything else would be so uncivilized.

I follow instruction booklets and I build my life in pieces like an IKEA purchase; where do these screws go?

I dream, I fear, I enjoy what precious time I was given at the beginning of this journey. Along the way, I discovered that where I’ve started will be where I will be in the end—a life is a life given and taken, a life taken is a life granted with opportunity to seek that only thing which cannot be sold.

I held bodies that turned cold; I held souls from which warmth cannot be described. I grow old, my patience grows young. I live across lands, on different continents, discovering that we are all the same, all the wiser if we so chose.

“This goes to all the wisdom and knowledge seekers of the World

Sabali, Patience.”

Broadening Perspectives - a collective work (Part II)

(At the beginning of 2013, The Green Elephant embarked on a journey to look for other bloggers to engage them on various green topics. Our first topic was on "Sustainability and Education" and you can read the articles here. Our second topic for the months of March and April is on Green Buildings and as usual, in our research we invariably touched on topics such as community building, innovation, zoning, urban agriculture, and other relevant topics. Our research is limited but we came to some common conclusions about growing a worthwhile city and shifting our paradigm of industrialization. If you wish to contribute to our work or want to suggest a topic, please contact Jin at jin@rethinki3.info.)





1.    How to Make Great, Green Cities: People, Water, and Streets - by Stephen Wade  

2.    Trash is the New Green - by Lauren Campbell-Kong 

3.    Zoning and Regulations - by Jin Kong 

4.    Zoning and Urban Agriculture - by Jin Kong

______________________________________________ 

How to Make Great, Green Cities: People, Water, and Streets

 - by Stephen Wade

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

A New Addition to Indianapolis' Green Initiatives - Interview with Greg Watson

by Laure Campbell Kong

Greg Watson is the owner and developer of Green With Indy, Indianapolis’ first curbside composting program. Greg is a small business owner and is now branching out; he began Green With Indy in 2009 and added the composting component just 6 months ago.

Zoning and Urban Agriculture – A Case for Shifting to an Agrarian Society

Humanism, properly speaking, is not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life . . .

-- I'LL TAKE MY STAND, The Twelve Southerners

Urban agriculture has become popular these days.[1] The movement of growing our own food and raising our own farm animals has been embraced by locavors, foodies, hippies and anarchists alike. The reasons for urban agriculture’s increasing popularity are many: some advocates for relocalization of food production to reduce carbon footprints of food,[2] some think it’s about food safety and security,[3] some want to save money,[4] some believe it to be a patriotic duty,[5] some believe in food sovereignty thereby claiming a defiance of government regulations and embracing self-reliance as a virtue;[6] then there are people like me who enjoy the labor of growing something, the love for food and connecting with it on more intimate—and often muddy—terms, and the nostalgia for having helped my parents grow all sort of things as a kid.

How to Make Great, Green Cities: People, Water, and Streets - by Stephen Wade

(At the beginning of 2013, The Green Elephant - TGE - decided to embark on a journey; we decided to look for other bloggers and engage them on various green topics. We defy the new social media trend that less is more, that blogs are just the mundane. We wanted to inject wisdom and deep introspection into the new media culture. So we asked bloggers to write on topics we proposed and we asked them to cite to sources to direct our readers attention to proper knowledge. This is about learning and bringing joy to those who would want meaningful change. There are no empty slogans here, no fast remedies for our troubles. The articles are not meant to be something precise or linear; they are meant to be a composition in a work of art, to be used; the whole is meant to be more than its parts as interpreted by the reader, not the writer, and they are meant to be transformative in nature. So as I compile and edit them, I bring them to you individually, and at the end of every two months, as a whole. Stay tuned.

Today, we bring you a piece written by Stephen Wade of the 2nd Green Revolution. We asked him to contribute on the topic of green buildings; he wrote this specifically for us and we thank him for his efforts. You can learn more about Stephen on 2nd Green Revolution's Writers Spotlight.)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

How to Make Great, Green Cities: People, Water, and Streets

 - by Stephen Wade

What does it mean to be green? In the modern era, its meaning has evolved from Rachel Carson’s documentation of pollution in Silent Spring, Teddy Roosevelt and and John Muir’s founding of the National Parks, and Henry David Thoreau’s solitary musings in Walden to a more complex, integrated, consumption-based, and urban meaning exhibited by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, the emergence of the ecological footprint concept, and reports by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about creating equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities.

Simply put, New York City, once considered the antithesis of green, now has some of the lowest per capita energy consumption in the USA because of its extensive reliance on public transit.[1] If green is now analogous to urban, what are the elements that make for great urban places?

Green Nontoxic Remodeling Ideas for Common Home Upgrades - Article by Anna Hackman, Editor of Green Talk

(This article was originally published on Green Talk. We told Anna about our new initiative seeking out green bloggers to collaborate on various topics and she happily forwarded this for us to post under our green buildings topic for the months of March and April. We also have another article by Stephen Wade of the 2nd Green Revolution on green cities coming your way. Cheers) 


We worry about the toxicity of our personal care products, pesticides in our food, and leaching of chemicals.  However, shouldn’t we be equally worried about the chemicals contained in the building products we install in our homes?

I am no stranger to writing about green building products.  Just to give you some background about me for those new to the site, hubby and I built an energy star house starting 2003 with a mission to source only low toxic or non-toxic materials.  Back in the early 2000s this was no easy feat.

Sourcing green building products has gotten so much easier.  To make your journey easier than mine, I did some legwork for you.   Listed below are some chemicals dos and don’ts for these common household upgrades.

On Happiness and Sustainability - Inglorious Bastards of My Writing

It's April. A few things happen around this time of the year: my birthday, a steady reminder that I'm getting older; tax-day, a not so friendly reminder of things to do and bills to pay; and remembering Tiananmen, a constant crack of my brain on the walls of my sublime hope that one day we will be free of transgressions against our own.  

In light of these dark and depressing things surrounding the time of the year, April is not all that bad. Grass is beginning to bud from the rain-soaked lands, flowers can be seen from a distant; the constant bird-songs in early mornings serve-up a reminder that summer will soon follow, women will show a lot of skin, and children will invariably get sun burned from hours and hours of soaking in the fun.

So this is a time to be happy as it is an inglorious bastard of my writing.