This article was previously published in One Earth magazine Volume 6, Issue 1, November/December 1985

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Alan Watson in Paper Recycling Bin 1985

Me in the Paper Recycling Bin at Cluny

For most of the time that I have been a member of the Findhorn Foundation I have been working with
garbage in one form or another. When I joined the community in 1978 I felt that one of the gifts I brought was an ecological awareness which I saw was lacking here at that time. For me this awareness has been expressed in part by working with the physical wastes generated here, seeking to reintegrate them into the cycles of nature. However, it soon became apparent to me that the most important work is on the level of consciousness, for I realised that garbage is only a symbol for what we are not aware of, particularly in relation to the closed loop systems of nature.

Within a few months of my arrival in the Foundation I began collecting waste paper and cardboard, which I arranged to sell to a mill for recycling. Previously, these had been thrown out with the other garbage, and I now asked members to separate them from other materials such as plastics and glass, and, for ease of collection, to flatten the cardboard boxes. Week after week I found all sorts of unwanted material in with the paper, and very few boxes flattened. I realised that the garbage was being put out with very little, if any, thought given to what was going to be done with it. I discovered what I call the ‘unconsciousness of garbage’!

Basically, what I was observing here at the Foundation and what I feel is symptomatic of our western industrial culture, is that when something becomes classified as ‘garbage’ it has to be got rid of as soon as possible, and/or left for someone else to deal with (ie garbage collectors). Here in Britain, we use black plastic garbage bags, so the wastes are literally ’out of sight, out of mind.’ I call this the ‘black plastic bag syndrome’ — it means that we don’t have to look at what is being thrown away (some people find the sight of garbage unpleasant), but it also makes it easy to be unaware and unconscious of what is being wasted, and what happens to those wastes.

Exactly the same principle operates on a larger level in our society, and can be seen most clearly in the current practices of burying nuclear and chemical wastes underground or in the oceans. There they are furthest from our sight and hardest to deal with when anything goes wrong, as in the case of Love Canal in the US, where buried toxic chemicals oozed to the surface in a housing development. It is clear to me that this happens on a larger level because we all do it on our own individual levels.

The act of physically burying garbage, which together with incineration is the main disposal technique used in industrial society, appears to me to be deeply symbolic of our inability to deal with the things in ourselves that we don’t like and don’t know what to do with. The wastes which are buried as landfill can be looked at as the physical manifestation of what we collectively bury in our own subconscious and hide from the world.

Some months after I started collecting the paper and cardboard, I joined the Garden Department at Cluny Hill College, and took on the responsibility for compost making. All the raw food scraps from the kitchen came out for the compost heap, and I began to dig the cooked food wastes, which do not decompose easily in compost heaps, into trenches in the vegetable garden where they would slowly break down and nourish the soil. As I was working with the cooked food I couldn’t help but be aware of my feelings of distaste about it, and this surprised me. I realised that a huge transformation in values had taken place in my consciousness, for this food, when it had been on the table as a meal, was very appetising and attractive to me, but now it was somehow unpleasant and disgusting, even. The food had obviously changed, in that it was cold and no longer fresh, but that degree of change was far surpassed by the change in my reactions to it.

Collecting garbage along Findhorn Bay 1985

Collecting garbage along Findhorn Bay 1985

Here I touched in on another aspect of the ‘unconsciousness of garbage’, one which is also widespread in our culture. How many of us, I wonder, have gladly carried around a soft drink can or chocolate bar wrapper as long as it contained something edible, but as soon as it was empty have thrown it away at the first opportunity because we don’t want to be associated with it anymore? This is the same thing — a radical value transformation in which something that was useful (and certainly still could be) becomes reclassified in our consciousness as ‘garbage’ and therefore has to be disposed of as soon as possible, frequently to the detriment of the natural environment surrounding us.

Our western culture, of course, has a vested interest in the large-scale production of waste products, and encourages this value transformation through the marketing of ‘disposable’ products such as razors, cigarette lighters and nappies. A steady demand for these products is maintained by stimulating consumers to throw away their old ones, rather than cleaning and/or repairing them, and this creates a much larger volume of garbage. This attitude is typified clearly by the packaging industry in Britain, a very powerful lobbying body which has successfully blocked legislation that would make it mandatory to have deposits on bottles, and thus would have encouraged consumers to return them. Instead, we now have the glass manufacturers actively promoting non-returnable bottles and collecting them through the ‘Bottle Bank’ scheme, to be melted down and made into new bottles which can then increase their sales figures.

As I continued working in the garden, I became more and more aware of the rhythms of nature, and the fact that there is no such thing as unwanted garbage in natural ecosystems. The end products of one process become the raw materials of another, and everything is integrated back into the ecosystem in one form or another. That our culture has such a different attitude to waste products is symbolic of how separate we have become from the natural world around us, and how linear our relationship to nature is.

Just as garbage collectors in western society occupy one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder, so it is that we have negative associations with the creatures that fulfil that role in nature. They include vultures, hyenas, sharks, rats, flies, cockroaches, maggots and fungi, and almost all are looked on with revulsion, and, in some cases, fear and hate. This is no fault of the creatures themselves, as they are only filling their ecological niche and serving an invaluable function within the fabric of Gaia. While it is true that sharks can in some cases be dangerous, and rats can be carriers of unpleasant diseases, these factors do not by themselves justify the widespread animosity towards detritivores (as nature’s garbage consumers are called). Rather, our animosity is a result of our projection: these creatures are dealing with what symbolises parts of ourselves that we are not willing to look at.

This same attitude is reflected in the meaning that certain words which relate to garbage have come to embody. Words like decay, rotten, scavenger and dung have all come to have bad connotations. They are often used in connection with things that we don’t approve of, as in ‘the weather is rotten this summer’ or ‘the increase in the crime rate is a sign of the decaying of our culture’. Here in Britain, the people who collect the garbage are called refuse collectors (pronounced REfuse); they are literally dealing with what we refuse to take care of ourselves! Again the language we use gives away the underlying aversion which we have to dealing with our waste products.

This attitude probably has its source in, and is made obvious by, how we relate to our bodily wastes in the west. In contrast to many eastern cultures, our civilisation has developed the flush toilet, sometimes referred to as a ‘public convenience’, which enables us to get rid of our human wastes very quickly by flushing them away with five gallons of water. This is indeed convenient, but like many of the other so-called conveniences of our culture, it actually fosters a lack of consciousness, and an opportunity to avoid dealing with something we don’t like. The flush toilet is also relatively hygienic, but it is not the only way of dealing with human wastes which is so.

Earlier this year I spent two months in India, where not only do they not have flush toilets, but neither do they use toilet paper. Instead, there is a small can of water which you dip your hand into, and you then wash yourself clean with your fingers (only the left hand is used for this). I found it surprisingly unpleasant to actually touch my own bodily wastes in this way as I have been brought up to believe that they are dangerous, offensive and carriers of disease. While this is undoubtedly true in some cases, if they are handled carefully and consciously they are quite safe, and I survived two months in India without any untoward effects.

Coming across my block towards my own bodily wastes confirmed my sense that it is our revulsion of those wastes which is the source of our unwillingness to deal with garbage, both individually and collectively. To see how pervasive this attitude is. consider for a moment that all our toilets, including those in our own homes, have locks on their doors, which most of us use. Why is this? For me, it is because I don’t want to be embarrassed, or cause embarrassment, by being disturbed in the act of excreting, by being caught ‘with my pants down’ — a phrase which, interestingly enough, has come to indicate a position of weakness in our culture. But what is there to be embarrassed about really? We all go to the toilet each day, and excrete and urinate, so why be shy about it? Recently, I talked about this in a workshop I was doing here at the Foundation and it gave rise to a lot of laughter and giggles — an emotional release, and again, a sign of the embarrassment associated with our excreta.

In many of our western languages the words used for excreta, such as ‘shit’, ‘scheiß’. ‘merde’ and ‘mierde’, have become some of the most derogatory of all, and their daily usage reinforces the deep-set connection between our bodily wastes and ‘badness’. Examples of this unconscious (for the most part) linking are to be found in everyday usage, as in ‘I feel shitty today’, or ‘he’s up shit creek without a paddle’. Given that our excreta are our main physical bodily products in life, this attitude to them is a disquieting reflection of an underlying negative view of our bodies.

Another undercurrent of our consciousness links garbage and death. The garbage heap, which is the end of our physical products, represents the end of our own physical existence in death. As we in our western culture, for the most part, avoid dealing with death, out of fear, so we steer clear of dealing with one of our symbols for it, ie garbage. This is in contrast to nature where death is not only an end, but also a new beginning, as the cycles continue. In our western society, there is a tendency to put people in certain circumstances out of sight and mind. Often these are the people closest to death—the chronically sick and the old, although the mentally ill and criminal are also treated in the same way. In a sense, they have become ‘garbage people’ as there is no role for them in our conventional society, and in another version of the ‘black plastic bag syndrome’, they are shut away in institutions; whether it be in a hospital, an asylum or a prison, the effect is the same—they are isolated from the ‘normal’ majority.

What has become clear to me over the years is that the creation garbage in the world won’t change and the problem won’t be solved until we begin to collectively change our consciousness about it, and move from an ‘unconsciousness of garbage’ to a consciousness of garbage. Only when this is done will there be no more plans for dumping nuclear wastes in the oceans, or burying toxic chemical wastes on land, or indeed the production of ‘useless’ garbage in the first place.

So, what will this consciousness of garbage involve? I feel that it has to begin with each of us taking responsibility for the wastes we create individually, and also for those we create indirectly (eg the garbage dumped at sea by the ships bringing us food imported from the other side of the world). This can be done by ensuring that wastes are recycled or reused, or, at the very least, rendered harmless and biodegradable. Better still we can avoid creating the garbage in the first place by, for example, buying fresh food instead of the pre-packaged variety, as recycling is only a second best alternative.

We can use nature as a model for there everything has a place and purpose and forms part of a closed loop or system, and from this we can design our human systems from a more holistic perspective that is more in alignment with the needs of our planet. We can also learn from some of the eastern cultures where there is a very different attitude to human excreta. In China, for example, there are still ‘night soil collectors’ who collect human faeces for composting and returning to the Earth. If we are to develop any sort of sustainable organic agriculture on a large scale, all organic wastes, including human wastes, will need to be returned to the land as fertiliser to ensure that there is no depletion of soil nutrients.

Most importantly of all, we need to transform our own inner attitudes to garbage, releasing any negative associations we have towards it, and seeing it instead as a resource and potential. A simple way to get in touch with any feelings you may have towards garbage is to attach a small, clear plastic bag to your belt and put in it any garbage that you produce during the day, and to see how it feels to have to live with it, instead of throwing it away. This is also a good way of reconnecting with the Earth, for Gaia has to live permanently with all the garbage we dump on her.

This, of course, involves dealing with our own inner garbage, the parts of ourselves that we suppress and don’t like, which can be uncomfortable, but will lead us more into the wholeness of who we are, and empower us further in our own lives. Ultimately, the volume of garbage that we produce can be seen as a measure of how out of harmony we are within ourselves and with nature. As we begin to reduce it, so will we be living more lightly on the Earth and more in symbiosis with Gaia.