By Larry Wartels
I’m formerly an urban planner by trade. I’ll never have to sleep under a freeway or dumpster dive for a used, likely-carcinogenic, plastic Coke bottle to sell back to the city (“Cash in the can,” Oct. 13-14). I went into planning because I’m passionate about getting to a 100-percent recycling, “closed-loop” resource economy, explained by Paul Hawken in his landmark books “The Ecology of Commerce” and “Natural Capitalism.”
However, I don’t work in the planning field anymore. I found that to get to sustainability, we need to concurrently struggle for human rights. That means ending poverty and prisons in North America and the world. Otherwise, the status quo of criminalizing poverty and environmental dissent — sending people to prison for economic “crimes” — will ensure that we remain a throw away society, generating desperate people looking in trash cans for their “wage.”
We could easily hire millions of people at union wages to build hi-tech machines that will automatically recycle everything. But that requires a fundamental political redirection of mental and physical capital away from thinking that prisons are the solution for anything. These solutions will first guarantee everyone a livable income. Sixty percent of what is defined as contemporary “work” is harmful to people and the planet. And we need to reinvest the resources before people are forced to commit actions that land them in prison.
Nobody murders or even steals a pop bottle out of a genuine and rational choice. Nobody is born with a gene to thieve and be violent.
The social messages that condition us to scapegoat the poor also keep us from getting to 100 percent recycling and dramatic resource-consumption reduction.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 17, 2007. Read the original PDF.