While I was reading the articles on environmental justice, and watching the environmental justice video, I was asking this question: waste we make HAVE TO go somewhere, at some point. Within U.S. toxic wastes end up in lower income, minority communities. People who live in these areas do not want toxic waste plants to be built in their neighbor, and for right reasons: it brings fatal effects to them and their children. When I was growing up in South Korea, I heard the same news over and over. People protest against nuclear power plant that is proposed to be built in their town. People protest against waste managing facilities in their town. These things are never built in Seoul, with is the capital city of South Korea, and the richest city in the Korean Peninsula. It is clearly a power struggle. NO ONE wants bad things in their neighborhood. But ones with lesser power get stuck with them. If no one in a country wants wastes in their town, where do they go? They have to go "somewhere"?
Both Annie Leonard and Anne Lucas make it clear that the "somewhere" in the global scale are the countries with no economic or political power. When I did research on environmental justice for class discussion, I learned that many of the old computer we "recycle" end up in China or India. Then people in those countries inhale toxic smoke for hours in order to extract small amount of gold or metal within those computer parts. As we discussed in class, people and environment in every parts of this world are interconnected. There are warning signs in the media all the time these days, telling us that because of this interconnection, wastes we make and dump to any parts of the world would eventually come back to us. I came to a conclusion that there is no "somewhere" where we can safely dump our stuff. As Annie Leonard said, solution is to make less stuff, and waste less. Another important solution is to recognize the interconnectivity between everyone in this world, and that power and money does not give someone or some country more worth than the others. The later concept hasn't been acknowledge for very very long time, perhaps since countries or tribes were started to be formed. But it really doesn't mean that it's too late for me to really reiterate it to myself.
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I think you made excellent points in your article. I too was struck by the notion of WHERE all of our stuff goes especially when watching the Story of Stuff. We consume and discard so much stuff on a daily basis and just because we are never faced with the reality of the amount of our waste we never have to confront it. If garbage dumps or nuclear waste stores were located in our backyards that would definitely provide incentive to cut back on our consumption. However, rich, white, American communities have been especially effective in keeping their waste out of their way. This is a result of the Not In My Backyard phenomenon. Like you mentioned no one wants bad things in their neighborhood. People don't even want things they may support in theory, like group homes for people with mental disorders, in their neighborhoods because this makes their lives more complicated. As a result of this attitude, the issues get pushed out of these neighborhoods and get passed on to less influential neighborhoods. This is exactly what happened with waste, it is being siphoned off into rural, poor communities or other nations. Like you also mentioned there is no safe space to put all of this waste. Each individual needs to start being responsible for their own consumption because this is the only way to effectively reduce our imprint.
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