COLUMN: We’ve removed ourselves from the duty of keeping Earth clean
In my senior year now, and as Recycling Education Coordinator at USU, I really only get two days of glory: America Recycles Day and Earth Day. Most people know about Earth Day, but America Recycles Day, Nov. 15, is virtually unknown. Growing up as a child idolizing Captain Planet and all of the great things he did to “take pollution down to zero,” I dreamed of saving the planet, and recycling seemed like just the way to do that. Well, after this year’s America Recycles Day, I’ve come to realize that maybe recycling isn’t the answer. At least not at USU. Maybe we have bigger things to worry about than that. John Sapp wrote a great opinion a few weeks ago about the blue recycling bin phantom that seems to scare people away from it. Maybe that’s the reason. Or, maybe it’s all too confusing with different colors and different places to put things. So, people just leave their stuff all around campus! That way they don’t have to make a choice between frightening blue bins or cans or anything!
To celebrate America Recycles Day Monday, USU Recycling teamed up with ECOS (Environmental Coalition of Students). The bins and bales out by the fountains Monday attracted a fair number of people, and we were able to raise awareness slightly. For me though, the day wasn’t even about that. ECOS members decided to go around campus and pick up trash and then build a statue out of it to show how bad we are here on campus with littering! The statue was HUGE! What kind of citizens are we producing at this university? ECOS members put a big pig head on the trash mound to say what they thought the answer to my previous question is. It’s hard to educate people how to recycle efficiently here when they aren’t even willing to throw things in the trash!
My question now is what can be done? What is it going to take for us to be responsible for our own actions here on campus? We don’t have the police force to go around and fine people for littering on campus, and we certainly don’t have the person-power, let alone the willpower to do the same to people who place recyclables in trash cans. The custodians don’t say anything because most of them aren’t around when people leave their junk everywhere, and we wouldn’t listen to them anyway. How about religion? Isn’t that supposed to teach us to be responsible before God for our actions? Yes. And for the dominant religion among us, it does, even if the culture may indicate otherwise.
We’ve removed the responsibility from ourselves somehow. We think that it is always somebody else’s job to take care of everything, and thus we escape all responsibility, even for picking up after ourselves. We think that by some miracle all of the pollution in the world will magically disappear for those who will be saved when things start to get really crazy on Earth. It’s people like the custodians, and my friends who picked up trash around campus and then sorted it to find that more than 80 percent of the litter was recyclable, that will end up cleaning up after everyone. But it’s more than that: we all pay the price for our disregard and inaction as God looks on in disgust – it all comes back to us. The verse in the Book of Mormon which states “it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” really brings our actions with the resources God has given us into perspective. Brigham Young stated “it is not our privilege to waste the Lord’s substance.” So why do we do it?
Jay Price is a senior majoring in sociology and is the recycling education coordinator for USU Recycling. Comments can be sent to jprice@cc.usu.edu.