Especies autóctonas migradoras catádromas

Fighting the culture of waste is an excellent example of doing our part to make distributism a reality in a hostile world. Our culture has be- come completely overrun with waste; that much can hardly be doubted. Landfills are so full that states are trucking their garbage elsewhere to dump it; everything, from toys to groceries, comes wrapped in at least one layer of packaging; we now actively choose wasteful methods rather than those which conserve and reuse. This culture of waste is funda- mentally antithetical to distributism, which emphasizes cultivation over exploitation, and is an aspect of modernity which everyone can fight.

Item Price per month ($) Price per year ($) Paper Plates 2.00 24.00 Paper Napkins 4.00 48.00 Disposable Razors 18.00 216.00 Tissues 5.00 60.00 Total 29.00 348.00

Table 3.1: A Sampling of Common Wasteful Products and Expendi-

tures

More than that, it is an aspect of modernity which everyone can benefit from fighting. The expense of our wasteful habits is more enor- mous than most of us realize. Let us take a relatively benign example: paper plates. While real dishes are not only of greater utility and durability than paper ones, most in our society choose to employ pa- per plates because they are much less of a bother. They need not be washed or put away; they can be simply used and discarded. Let us examine the expense of such habits for a reasonably healthy (by “reasonably healthy” I mean “eating together at home more than once a week”) family of only four. In this way we can determine roughly how insignificant such wasteful expenditures might be for a family; re- member that for many Catholics families, much larger than only four persons, they will be considerably greater.1

We will assume that paper plates come in packages of one hundred, and each of these packages costs $2.00. At each meal, this family uses one plate per person (an unwarranted assumption, since many people use two such plates per person because their flimsiness makes one next to useless). We will also assume that this family eats only one meal per day together at home, making a total of twenty-eight plates per week. We will round it off and say that it is a package of one hundred per month. This makes an expense of $24.00 every year, spent solely on paper plates to facilitate sloth. Table 3.1 shows similar expenditures on a number of different items, giving a total which ought to give any 1_{Although predicting how greater is much too difficult. Razor expenses, for}

example, will vary depending on the ratio of males to females. The fact that they will be greater, however, is indubitable.

prudent head of household cause to think.

Many, particularly those blessed with ample resources, will look upon these numbers and scoff, claiming that they are too small to bother with. It is also popular to claim that one’s time is worth too much to spend it rectifying such minor expenses. However, in the mod- ern world popular ideas and wrong ideas are often coextensive; this case is an excellent example. Neither claim can stand up to rational inquiry, and both neglect very important aspects of resource steward- ship, a duty that man was given long ago, when both he and the world were young.2

In the first place, while these numbers may be a tiny amount to one with a great deal of money, to one with little money it is a great deal. While it is certainly true that those with little money ought not to indulge in such disposable nonsense, it is also true that we are all living in a culture which encourages the use of disposable items as much as possible. We live in an age in which containers are disposable; washing Tupperware has become such a chore for us that manufacturers have graciously provided us with cheap containers that we can simply throw away. We live in a disposable culture, and the gods of that culture, particularly for those who are poor or uneducated, are not so easy to resist.3

Furthermore, while the amount of money might be small in the singular, it is a great deal of money in the aggregate. There are at present over two hundred and fifty million people living in America.4

Multiply that small amount spent by each family per year on cheap, disposable products and it comes to a ridiculously high sum5 which

even the wealthiest should be unable to scorn. This money could be given to the Church, to the poor, for musical instruments and better educations for our children; instead it is being plunged into wasteful

2_{See Genesis 1–3.}

3_{Not to mention the hordes of advertising, supported by capitalists as a wonder-}

ful tool of economic growth, persuading them that they want and need such waste. It is foolish to tell them that they should not buy these products while constantly trying to convince them that they should.

4_{I have not looked at the most recent census; the true figure is probably higher}

than that.

5_{A whopping $1,500,000,000 (a billion and a half dollars) in our paper plate}

example, assuming that 250,000,000 people are equally divided into families of four, which seems a decent approximation.

expenditures so that we can avoid the split-second chore of tossing our handkerchiefs into the laundry along with our clothes and towels. It is nothing less than wasteful sloth, and we ought to do our best to put a stop to it, at least in our own daily lives. The expense of purchasing durable, reusable products is one-time and is usually made up in a year, or a few years at most; our surplus can then be spent on more useful things, and we are no longer wasting both money and materials in the constant cycle of consumption that our society so glorifies. This is not nitpicking eco-lunacy; it is simply common sense and Christian morality.

The idea that it is not worth our time to reuse durable products is equally fallacious. Too often we in the modern day measure everything we do by the wage we are able to command every hour. A lawyer, for example, will point out that he is able to bill two hundred dollars per hour in the office; therefore, unless every hour spent rinsing his electric razor, rather than throwing away his disposable ones, brings in two hundred dollars, he has wasted those hours. However, the worth of our labor is not truly measured by our hourly wage; our wage is merely what someone is willing to pay for our services. The true value of our labor is the work which we do. If our work is saving money that might be devoted to more noble causes than saving the back-breaking effort required to rinse out a handkerchief rather than throw away a tissue, then it was certainly well worth our effort, even if we are not able to bill two hundred dollars for it.

Any householder is bound by his duty both to his family and to God to minimize such useless expenditures. The money that is going into landfills in these expenses could easily be put to much better use if saved by the use of more durable products. The missions could be better funded; our churches could be more beautiful; the poor might be full and raised up from their lowly state. But instead we choose to use our money on paper plates because we are too lazy to wash our real ones. It is scandal to the world and a sin in ourselves; let us root it up before it becomes more ingrained.

How can we do this? Very simply, we can use real plates, and go through the effort (very slight, as it turns out) of washing them. We can buy a straight-edge razor and use it, rather than disposable ones (or an electric, if straight-edges make us nervous). We can use handkerchiefs, and wash them, rather than tissues, and throw them away. We can

try to buy fresher foods which are not wrapped in several layers of packaging. When we buy something, we can save a little longer and buy the more durable item rather than granting our senses instant gratification by buying the cheaper one immediately. Waste is, we must all remember, a sin, and distributism is in large part an attempt to eliminate societal structures that are based on sin. Let us minimize our waste, therefore, and do our part for the building of the culture of life.