Basura

That's right. I'm writing about trash. Should I be taking something from the fact that I feel the need to warn you folks so often that you don't have to read what I write if you don't want to? Alas. I suppose you already know that anyway; such is the beauty of the internet. But anyway:

Anyone who's ever spent any time in big Latin American cities or even driven through one knows they're pretty dirty. Well, okay, they're really dirty. I went out into the field three times this week and while many of the communities were in more "suburban" areas, trash was as big of a problem there as in the city, if not bigger. I'm quite aware that these are hardly wonderful specimens of photography, but they get the idea across:

So what do people around here do with their trash? Well, as you can see, they either throw it in the streets, throw it in piles with everyone else in their neighborhood, or quite often, they burn it. Why? Well, because they don't have a choice. No one comes by every Tuesday to pick up their garbage and recycling and every other Tuesday to pick up their yard-waste and compost too. No one comes by at all. There's no infrastructure or funding to make this possible, and there's no one to take the initiative. There are no dumps to take it to and most of them face more pressing problems on a daily basis anyway. Maybe it's about a lack of pride in their community or some sort of Tragedy of the Commons, but mostly I think it's just a lack of options.

Like so many other things I've seen in these past few weeks, I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there isn't one. Or maybe there are many, but nobody wants to be the first to try. I don't know. What I do know, is that it makes all the fuss you hear about the environment when you live somewhere like Boulder, Colorado, as I do, seem trivial and even ignorant. I don't want to degrade the efforts people make to improve the environment, I understand that every bit helps, but does it matter so much if your SunChips come in a compostable bag if all over the world there are people burning their trash and living with their neighborhood's "landfill" in their back yard? Maybe not.

But what is one to do? We can't change the whole world all at once. We just do the best that we can. So, carry on.