The Mexico of my childhood memory (San Miguel de Allende, 1978) is dirty: lots of garbage in the streets, dead animals, smelly creeks. From what I’ve seen on this trip, much has changed. In towns and cities, the streets are clean, free of litter and often swept. Especially in the smaller cities, the streets seem loved. The roadways outside of town are a different story: lots of litter, frequent squashed creatures; so much, in fact, that it seems like there is no moral/societal concern for such litter.

We went to a hot springs out in the woods frequented by Guadalajaran weekenders. Here too, the garbage was everywhere, bottles and plastic bags in the bushes, dirty diapers on river’s edge, toilet paper gardens within sight of the camping areas. Such a beautiful place (the whole river flowed hot from the vocanic mountains above) and so much human disregard for it. Ecologically, litter has never been one of my bigger concerns; I see it generally as more of a nuisance to our own human experience of beauty than as an actual ecological threat. But here I started to see it as an indicator for Mexican concern for the environment, or lack of it. You wouldn’t trash your mom’s house, out of respect for her. If you’d throw your garbage in the woods, there’s a basic lack of respect for mother Earth, and it might be difficult to motivate you to change any of your other habits out of ecological concern

We picked a bunch of it up, as much for our own aesthetic experience of the area as for any altruistic urges, but it came in mountains, too much work for any do-gooder crew. Or was it? On Monday morning, the city folk had all left and here comes the garbage pickers, 4 or 5 people walking through the area with big bags and throwing them in the back of a pickup.

Descending towards the coast from the mountain city of Tepic, we found ourselves on a low-traffic highway through a temperate forest. Here too, depite lack of people, there was plenty of litter in the ditches. I came around the corner of a particularly divine tributary valley and saw that the downstream edge was literally full of garbage, not a car’s worth or even a house’s worth, but more like the gargabe truck came and dumped its load. Thinking about it on the descent, I realized that this was basically our garbage, garbage we had thrown “away” in a seemingly proper receptacle and that had been collected and taken here, or somewhere else out in the woods, and “littered.”

So we’ve been trying to minimize our use of throwawayables. This is hard in today’s world, where plastic is cheaper than soapy water (and easier, too). The Mexican street vendor (like the American drive-up teenager) wants to give you a foam plate, plastic fork, foam cup, plastic straw, chlorine bleached virgin paper napkin, and a plastic bag or two to put it all in. This is 100 million year old plastic that will serve your eating needs for 2–10 minutes before entering the mysterious waste stream, where the one the you can be sure of is that it won’t go “away” after all. (Have you heard of the Pacific Ocean’s floating island of plastic that’s twice as big as the United States and has 6 times more plastic than plankton?) So we decided there should be a tax.

True to one of the tenets of the Pleasant Revolution—wherein: it might be hard to change the system but at least you can change yourself— we realized we wouldn’t be able to create a Mexican plastic tax overnight, but that we could tax ourselves. So now, in theory, when one of us uses anything disposable, we have to contribute 5 pesos to the group fund. At the least, this has led to a much higher level of thought around garbage and disposables, and a dramatic decrease in its consumption. We’ll tell you how it goes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 1:59 am and is filed under Enviro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.