convenience

Recording of putting dishes into dishwasher

The following recording is the sound of dishes being loaded, by students, into a dish dispenser where employers are paid to clean the dishes. This system is designed for convenience and efficiency, keeping students/faculty fluid in their day to day activities that involve consuming and disposing food waste. However, as a culture we fail to recognize the value of what our systems/employers do for us, that is, to make our personal lives easier. Susan Leigh Star does a great job of putting our individual lives in perspective of the marginalized saying, “For a railroad engineer, the rails are not infrastructure but topic. For the person in the wheelchair, the stairs and doorjamb in front of a building are not seamless sub tenders of use, but barriers” (Star, 380). For the people who drop their dishes off, it's a matter of convenience and luxury. For the dishwasher it's a means of work, and a means of provision for personal essentials. Our waste system has become so convenient, because of the embeddedness it has within our human/social systems. Star describes embeddedness as, “Infrastructure [that] is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies. People do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure” (Star, 381). It has become a social norm, not just at Furman, but in America, to see these trash cans and dish dispensaries, embedded in our overall systems. Cronon does a good job of bringing up an important question that relates to how we choose to dwell in our living spaces, “If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live” (Cronon, 87). If we are able to dispose of our waste in an easy and convenient matter, then what does it teach us in terms of our overall dwelling space? We now do not value reusability, but disposability because of the convenience it provides. Cronon brings up a key point in this quotation by understanding how our distance from wilderness has programmed specific ideals that we take for granted. It’s impossible to say that one hundred per cent of Americans contribute to this problem. A lot want to make a positive change. However, Gerrard points out that many rely too heavily on outside sources, to change policies/problems, instead of changing their own personal actions, stating that, “the very broad range of people who are concerned about environmental issues such as global warming and pollution, but who wish to maintain or improve their standard of living as conventionally defined, and who would not welcome radical social change, will be described hereinafter as ‘environmentalists’…They may be concerned about natural resource scarcity or pollution but would look to governments or non-governmental organizations such as charities to provide solutions, usually technological ones” (Gerrard, 21). Many of us want to see a different system that values our environment and not one centered on the convenience of producing more waste. However, we rely too often on outside agencies and organizations to produce the science and policies to make the changes we want to see. Furman’s dish dispenser allows us convenience, but also allows disregard for acknowledging how much waste we generate as well as the people who have to cater to our waste.