Lift Up Your Hearts!

When I promised you more Mollie Engelhart, I was anticipating drawing on a backlog of her earlier columns that I've marked for the purpose. But today's jumped out at me and took precedence. "When Did Everything Become Disposable?" is her reflections on the trend of travelling to an event empty-handed, buying everything needed at the site (coolers, tents, chairs, clothes), and abandoning it all when the event is over.

I worked at Coachella for years as a food vendor, and I watched some version of this happen every time. People would fly in from another state or another country, stop at Walmart or REI, buy everything they needed for the weekend, and then leave much of it behind. ... At Coachella, we actually used to get excited when the festival ended because other people’s waste was valuable to us. ... The person who bought a cooler, tent, or canopy on Friday saw garbage by Monday. I saw equipment I might use for another decade.

It would be easy to ... blame spoiled festivalgoers or “kids these days.” But then I look around my own house. ... I would never buy a tent and leave it in a field three days later. But how fundamentally different is the mountain of barely used stuff inside my own house? Maybe my version of the festival campground is simply accumulated over 11 years and hidden behind walls where nobody can take a drone photograph of it.

I don’t want to wag my finger at the people who left their tents behind. I want to ask what happened to all of us. ... Maybe what we have lost is bigger than our ability to recycle. We have lost our relationship with objects. ... For most of human history, things were expensive not simply in money but also in human labor and resources. Clothes were patched. Shoes were resoled. Tools were sharpened. Jars were saved. Furniture was repaired. Children’s clothes were passed down among siblings and cousins. Things stayed in families long enough to acquire stories. ... Now, we live in a world where a tent can cost less than checking an extra bag on an airplane. When that happens, disposability isn’t simply a character flaw. We have built the economics around it. Something can be incredibly costly in resources while being incredibly cheap in dollars, and throwing it away becomes the rational choice for the person who bought it.

Maybe that’s one small place to begin. Before buying something, we could ask not only “How much does this cost?” or “Do I need this?” but also “What happens to this thing when I’m done with it?”

The problem isn't new, Mollie says, and I agree with her. I remember a story told by Don Aslett, probably back in the 1990's, in which he took over a unprofitable service that did the job of decorating a venue for Christmas every year: taking the decorations out of storage, setting them all up, then later removing, repacking, and returning them to storage. Under Aslett's direction, the money-losing business began making a substantial profit. How did he accomplish this? Every year, he bought new decorations, throwing them away when the event was over, saving a great deal of money that had gone into labor and storage charges. At the time, I understood the point he was making, but it made me feel queasy. It still does, even if it makes economic sense.

I couldn't resist making my own comment on the article:

You’ve put your finger on something that has been bothering me for several years. When my father moved from his big Victorian house to a small cottage, my daughter was newly married and thrilled to be the recipient of some of his furniture. Nowadays it seems people would rather buy “disposable” furniture from IKEA than inherit a beautiful, well-crafted antique that has been in their family for generations. Given how mobile many people’s lifestyles are, that makes some sense, but it’s just one more of the many pressures that are stripping young people of their sense of history and family.