The Inklings' Environmental Warnings: A World of Waste
Part 1 of a 3-part series examining The Inklings Warnings of the Environmental Consequences of Modern Life
In Indonesia, there are people living in garbage. They eat around garbage, they sleep around garbage, they give birth to their children and raise their families around garbage.
The people pictured above live in Bantar Gebang, which is Indonesia’s biggest landfill. Their daily setting consists of mountains of rotten food, diapers, and human waste.
Why would anyone subject themselves and their families to these living conditions? Because these people are trash pickers. They make their living by picking through mountains of garbage looking for valuables, and recyclables like glass, aluminum, and recyclable plastics. According to a 2018 Huffington Post report chronicling their daily lives, they are able to make about $200 a month picking through the mountains of trash.
The people living in Indonesia are not unique. There are also slums like Bantar Gebang in India, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, just to name a few examples.
To understand how we reached a point where we, as a society, have produced villages centered around garbage, let’s examine an essay by 20th century author (and brief inkling) Dorothy L. Sayers, called Why Work?
Here, in a collection of essays called Creed or Chaos that are devoted to the importance of preserving Christian dogma, lies an essay on the proper theological understanding of human activity, and in it, a scathing critique of the economic system of pre-war England and its environmental impacts.
Wartime, Waste and An Unchanged World
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote her essay during World War II, where the demands of total war forced English society to accept the rationing of goods and a more simple way of living so more resources could be devoted to the war effort. She critiqued the pre-war economy for its waste:
Can you remember […] what things were like before the war? The stockings we bought cheap and threw away to save the trouble of mending? […] the bread and bones and scraps of fat that littered the dustbins – not only of the rich, but of the poor? […] The mountains of empty tins that nobody found it worth while to salvage, rusting and stinking on the refuse-dumps? [...] The land choked and impoverished with thistle and ragwort, because it did not pay to farm it? […] The advertisements imploring and exhorting and cajoling and menacing and bullying us to glut ourselves with things we did not want, in the name of snobbery and idleness and sex-appeal? And the fierce international scramble to find in helpless and backward nations a market on which to fob off all the superfluous rubbish which the inexorable machines ground out hour by hour to create money and to create employment?” - Creed or Chaos, “Why Work?”, 47-48.
Sayers’ description of the pre-war economy should ring as resoundingly familiar to the economic system we see today. It may have been hard for Sayers to have imagined that we would have allowed this problem to get so bad that it reaches the point where we allow plastic to fill our oceans, species to die off en masse through habitat loss, and our garbage to become the towns some of our fellow humans live and work in, but Sayers may not have been surprised. After all, all the problems she described above would have only gotten worse if society did not change course.
And change course we have not. It may not be as obvious to us today as it was in Sayers’ time, but one of the reasons waste has become such a major problem in places like Indonesia but does not seem to be as big of a deal in developed nations, is that, in many cases, we are pawning off our trash to the less developed world.1 We have reached a point of such excess and waste where the “superfluous rubbish” we “fob off” on “helpless and backward nations” that Sayers lamented is now literal rubbish.
Work and Stewardship
As striking as her economic and environmental critique of our habits is, the most striking part of the essay is not Sayers’ economic critique, but her solution: a radical re-thinking of our way of work that puts work in its proper theological focus.
Sayers makes the point that we tend to look at work as merely a means to an end, rather than the end itself, and this has resulted in not only many of our societal and economic problems, but also many of our environmental problems. Because employers view labor as a means to obtain a product that they can sell as cheap as possible for the biggest profit imaginable, they are incentivized to sell cheap, disposable products to consumers who will continue to keep the profits flowing by buying more cheap disposable products. Since laborers share this communal view of work, they tend to care little about the quality of the product so long as they stay employed and are given a reasonable wage. This leads to much of what we produce to be unnecessary garbage and encourages lives that uphold convenience and efficiency as ultimate goods, while many workers feel a crushing meaningless to the work that occupies most of their waking hours.
After pointing out the environmental and spiritual harms these lifestyles cause that have already been described above, Sayers argues that instead of looking at work as merely a means to get money or to help someone earn a profit, we need to look at the results of work as the end of work itself. Or, in other words, we need to view the point of work as the fulfillment of man’s nature.
Things will start to improve when people start trying to live simple, holy lives, which will ultimately lead us to desire to buy fewer items, and when we do buy things, to desire them to be good things that will last.
Sayers makes the argument that this is the Christian way of viewing work. According to scripture, man is created in God’s Image and is meant to be creative in the same way that God is (Gen 1:26-30; 2:5-7). After making everything in the universe, he surveys it, sees that it is all very good, and then he rests. God does not produce a shoddy, haphazard world, but a beautiful one, and Sayers assures us that the same is true about God incarnate, Jesus Christ:
“No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and Earth.” - Why Work?
Man is similarly called to produce good work that is made with good items and that is used for good things since, as she says, “The only Christian work is good work well done”. This means that it is not fitting for man to merely keep machines running as it churns out cheap disposable items. Instead, workers should demand that their work actually engage them and that the products they produce be well-made and purposeful. That it be the quality of work akin to that which man was created to do in the Garden of Eden: to steward over the creation to bring forth the potential God gave it.
The Path Forward
Within Why Work was a warning. Sayers warns that to go back to the pre-war economy would amount to being “bamboozled by our vanity, indolence, and greed”. This view of work that Sayers has lamented has continued, and may have only gotten worse, and we have certainly reaped the consequences. We have become overly materialistic to the point that many are becoming spiritually bankrupt and we are destroying our planet and the lives of 15 million desperate people who live in these garbage slums with it.
So what is a Christian to do? Certainly, we do need a Christian ethic of work. Such an ethic would produce good things for the world, and not things that we would be content with merely having thrown in the trash immediately after it is produced. Such work would engage our souls more fully and when we have the experience of examining our work and seeing that it is good, we are able to more fully love the things that God created and deemed good as well. This would help to put us in a better relationship with other people as well as nature.
However, the environmental problems born by this wrong-headed view of the end of work, sadly, require solutions bigger than just individuals making smart lifestyle and work choices. There is certainly room for talking about legislative fixes, but we are so far from recognizing the severity of the problem, there is currently little political will to pass such solutions.
To help things to change, we as Christians need to adopt a spirit of Christian poverty. Christ calls us not to love the things of the world, and yet the developed economy is dependent upon us loving things and desiring more of them. Things will start to improve when people start trying to live simple, holy lives, which will ultimately lead us to desire to buy fewer items, and when we do buy things, to desire them to be good items that will last. By providing a witness to this way of life in our churches and communities, we can start show the world there is a different way to live, and shift the culture away from the ways of waste, to grapple with fixing the mess we’ve made, and go back to a more balanced way of life.
To read articles about Trash Pickers and how much of the trash in their landfill coming from developed countries, read Living in Landfill from The Independent and this article discussing where much of America’s plastic waste gets sent.