Post-consumer waste -- realized in the pungent stench of the colossal wastelands of garbage mountains, gray gooey bodies of water, the streets and sewages laminated in plastic -- is a reality that most of us must confront. That is, unless one is fortunate enough to be inside the few privileged spaces in the city where this can be ignored.
And who bears the burden of these ghastly pockets of waste? Oftentimes, we are made to internalize the responsibility, encapsulated in phrases such as “desh amar, dosh amar” (my country, my fault). This campaign of shifting blame to the ordinary citizens from the producers and distributors of plastic, has proven to be a resounding success.
For as long as I can remember, we have shamed and blamed each other for littering, for treating this country of ours as nothing more than an open-air garbage dump. We have attacked each other and ourselves for failing to live up to the standard of a model citizen, stuck in a vicious cycle of blame. This is what we have done to each other.
However, it is time we realized that this does nothing more than distract us further from the real problem.
Phrases like “desh amar, dosh amar” may seduce us with its alliteration, but it is nowhere near the solution it prescribes to be. In fact, it pushes the narrative that littering effectively symbolizes everything wrong with our country through our actions. But there are greater forces at play here.
I won’t deny that littering is a problem: People do overwhelmingly act in ways which pose direct or indirect harm to the ecosystems they occupy, including insects, animals, and people. The insensitivity with which some of us deal with garbage, for instance, throwing plastic water bottles out from cars, still surprises me, as if this was just another act in line with our ordinary, everyday expectations.
However, I also think littering must be an inherently urban problem. That is, no matter how much we might imagine a dichotomy between the urban and rural, our countryside to be full of lush greenery and simple people who are not acquainted with modernity, we might need to acknowledge that Coca-Colonization has been pervasive.
There is an “urban” that we cannot ever escape from in this globalized world, no matter how virgin the lands we may try to escape to. Nature has been militarized, landscaped, and tamed for consumption.
Nature is now an object, luxury and escapism, somewhere to go on holiday or leisure (if one can afford to, that is); it is a fling, a short-lived affair before going back to the “real world.”
While visiting some relatives in a village in Mymensingh, I was on an uthan (or porch) with my cousins and kin, devouring one luscious lychee after another, which had been picked from the tree right next to us, shaded under its leaves. I noticed everyone throwing the seeds on the ground, and, instinctively, it felt wrong: We can’t just discard trash on the floor! But I realized that the seeds were headed towards a ground fertile, of ochre mud, not of asphalt and concrete, and our “litter” was not plastic candy wrappers, but seeds.
This must be how trees are often born, through the mobility and migration of humans and birds and our otherkin species who disperse seeds, not from development funds from Western financial saviors. In a natural ecology where fragmentations such as self, nature, leisure, work, do not exist, “littering” may not be a toxic trait, but a virtue. Perhaps the people we shame are more governed by their “primitive” minds which can’t yet live on proper terms with development or modernity.
Nature has been militarized, landscaped, and tamed for consumption
Hence, they often fail to become modern citizens, keeping their nation clean as all modern citizens should. This instinct of dispersing seeds could be ancestral, but now prove to be quite unproductive, transforming them into acts which cause environmental harm.
The suffering of ordinary people is agnostic of political ideology; whether or not you subscribe to the notion of the neoliberal and/or nationalistic agenda of being good citizens ceases to matter. The outside world without an adequate air conditioner feels unbearable, the air hard to digest, and trash, trash is everywhere.
It starts from outside our homes (unless you’re lucky) to the homes of Bengal tigers (though recently single-use plastics have been announced to be banned in Sundarbans, but the ecological exploitations, such as by tourism, grow alarmingly).
It does not matter how you approach the developmental discourse, or whether you endorse the nationalistic addendum to the neoliberal production of the citizen with a preexisting guilty conscience, it’s hard to disagree that there is simply any land left (where you will be permitted) to plant trees, or a way to exist without generating waste.
Without a certain kind of privilege, it is nearly impossible to be the good citizen they want you to be. No matter how much we bemoan plant trees and save the environment, urban settlers have barely any space to exist, let alone own property where they can plant trees. It’s hard to access water and food outside without buying plastic, and while it is still necessary to discard them properly in bins, they still inevitably end up in the environment, the cost of which is paid by the poorest among us. Neoliberalism promises progress, produces a kind of aspiration to be able to consume more products.
But it's a paradoxical battle that we fight, because this consumption which supposedly equates to a better living standard generates even more waste, for which we also receive more blame.
Why is it that the poorest and “primitive” people among us, bound to bear this burden of being a bad citizen? Is there any way out of this vicious cycle?
To begin with, we can use some skepticism when we encounter environmentalism framed through a lens of patriotic sentimentality and neoliberal agendas, which only seeks profit with the false promise for freedom. It won’t be inaccurate to state that for long periods of human civilization people have lived in, with, and as nature.
We need to recognize that in urban, built environments, which we are told to want and embrace, we can't hold ourselves and others to contradictory standards. Hence, before assuming it’s “my country and my fault,” it might be worthwhile to consider which institutions call the shots and if they can keep displacing responsibility, and for how much longer they can sustain their empire by shaming the ways we choose to go about living our lives.
Ohama Raaz is a visual artist. She is also the Founder of Antobihin, an organization that offers plastic-free products.
