EPISTEMOLOGY AND TRASH,
OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND (ALMOST)
LOVE LITTER

Angela Lehman-Rios

There’s trash in my neighborhood, and I hate it. Some of it drifts down the block, especially on Mondays, from the overflowing supercans of the restaurant on the corner. Some comes from students as they walk to and from the school down the street. I’ve seen neighbors drop trash out their car windows as they drive around and set bottles down on the sidewalk not 10 feet from a trashcan.

It’s easy for me to think that people litter because they’re thoughtless or lazy, or both. It’s especially easy for me to think this because I don’t litter: I put my trash in a plastic bag, put the bag in the supercan, and wait for the garbage truck to take it away so I don’t have to look at it anymore. Easy!

I enjoyed all this ease for an awfully long time before I started to recognize everything was so easy because I was avoiding the bigger picture. Although I’m not going to discuss here how trash is trash whether it’s above ground or below, in a landfill, that’s certainly a major element of the big picture. My realization has more to do with how easy it is to dismiss people whose actions are different from my own, so different that I can’t understand them, and what the consequences of such dismissal might be. Piecing together a memory of trash in a different setting motivated me to look beyond the easy judgments about litter on my own street.

When I was in high school, I spent a summer in the southwest delta region of Alaska. A decade earlier, my family had lived there for four years, and my parents kept in touch with several people, some of whom we stayed with that summer.

One month we lived with Delores, a Yup’ik woman, and had the opportunity to go to her family’s fish camp along the Kuskokwim River. All summer, families from Bethel and other towns up and down the river lived at their camps, where they caught and prepared fish to dry for a winter food source.

Among the many things I remember about fish camp is the garbage. Kool-Aid containers, old diapers, torn magazines, and other trash lay in heaps around the land by the river. As a peevish, judgmental teenager, I couldn’t understand how anyone would live that way. If I thought any further than that, I probably chalked it up to ignorance, or, in a charitable moment, lack of education.

I also remember that as Delores and her mother and sisters gutted hundreds of salmon, they saved some of the fish eggs and heads to use in soup, but most were tossed on the riverbank, where gulls swooped down and fought over them. The sled dogs ate other parts that the people didn’t eat or dry, and the rest was thrown away.

It wasn’t until years later that I put those two pictures together and began to realize that I had been judging what I saw as “litter” by assumptions I brought with me from a different cultural context. Much of the trash Delores or, even more, her parents grew up throwing away was like those fish innards: things that would turn to dirt in a year or so. Inorganic or slow-to-biodegrade material was newer to that part of the world than to mine, and personal habits and governmental systems of dealing with permanent trash might not have been fully developed.

And of course, at fish camp, where the river is the only street, there’s no curbside trash pickup. Even if there were, the trash would have to be loaded on a barge, or on an airplane when the rivers are frozen, and carried away south. Landfills are non-existent in a region where permafrost prevents digging below a few feet. And because there are no roads leading in and out of many Alaskan towns, everything, including trash, must arrive and leave by plane or boat. Disposable diapers can’t just be casually forgotten. Trash remains ugly, and if it’s burned, it makes ugly, noxious smoke.

I don’t even know if what I saw at fish camp was litter. My dismissal of their actions as “ignorant” prevented me from understanding the full situation. If I had been more observant and inquisitive, I might have learned that everything was hauled out at the end of the fishing season. Also, I wish I had gauged how the amount of trash produced there by a group of 10 to 12 people compared to the amount produced at home by my family of four.

Coming in retrospect to an understanding, however limited, about the reasons for “litter” at fish camp led me to consider my street here in Richmond, Virginia. As I’ve thought in circles about why there’s so much litter in my neighborhood, and why I seem to have made the problem into something larger than itself (why not just go out and pick up the trash, Angela?!), I’ve realized I’m fascinated by something I just can’t understand.

I live in a small urban neighborhood with an especially strong identity, partly because it’s physically separated from other neighborhoods by a river, a graveyard, a university, and a major road. Until recently, the resident population has been relatively stable, with the same families of working-class or underemployed whites living and dying here for generations.

I like the feel of a small, rural town, the grassy lots, the busy front porches. But we are in the city—and each house has a big trashcan given to us by the city. Many corners have public trash receptacles. To me, it seems so easy not to throw things on the street. It’s not just that I think there’s no excuse to litter, it’s that I slam up against a wall between myself and understanding: why do some people litter?

I do know it’s conjectured that people who feel a lack of ownership of their surroundings are more likely to litter. This might be relevant to my area, where home ownership rates are lower than nearby neighborhoods. And this might partly account for my difficulty in understanding litter: I grew up in a house my family owned, and we own our house now. I’ve always lived with enough resources to have either a physical or—maybe more significantly—a psychological ownership of my environment. If I feel in control of what happens to me, I’m likely to feel in control of and thus responsible for my surroundings, as well. As much as I read and learn, it’s hard to imagine what it is like to not feel this way.

And probably because I’ve always been in relative control of my life, I become agitated over limits I can’t overtake. I’m not talking about the trash now, but about my own incapacity to understand why, for example, someone would throw a plastic cup out the car window, in this neighborhood or anywhere. It takes a lot of humility to tell myself that although I may never truly understand someone’s actions, I can continue to relate to that person as a fellow human. (It also takes a lot of humility for me to go out and pick up the trash without feeling angry.) It’s easier to label as ignorant a person whose actions I can’t understand, so I don’t have to admit my failure to understand.

But a lack of understanding need not be a separating wall. In fact, it probably only appears that way to people like me who get preoccupied with a particular limitation. If I put my nose up to a single brick, it looks like a wall. I miss the vaster open area of our resemblance. For every thing we can’t understand about another person, there are many more we can. I’m trying to do better at looking for those things among those neighbors who seem to have different attitudes about trash than I do, or those who have grown up with different relationships to their surroundings.

I’ll always be fascinated by what I can’t understand—I think that’s natural. (Love, death, and God, after all, are among the great themes of art and literature!) It just took me a while to realize that sometimes I use my lack of understanding as an excuse to be judgmental or as a blinder to the bigger picture of human commonality.

—Angela Lehman-Rios is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia.