My groups action project has turned out to be a far more complicated and insightful experience that that of what we originally anticipated. From the beginning Tova, Kate, Ryan, and I knew that we wanted the underlying theme of our project to be centered on waste production and management. Some issues of the Anthropocene are easy to push out of your mind, as you don’t have to visually see the effects on a daily basis. However the effects of waste production are just so horribly clear as you walk through any given part of the Uw community, especially Greek Row. As we started to ruminate however on the potential for lasting impact we came to a resounding conclusion.
Greek Row Trash
We realized that our project wasn’t even scratching the surface of the potential for systemic change, which is what our project ultimately wanted to achieve. Cleaning up a piece of land that will just get trashed the next time someone has a party is not the kind of impact that we wanted to leave, and we knew that the likelihood of engaging the Greek community in open conversations on waste mitigation was not very good. On a personal level this also led me to reflect on the many goodwill efforts of humans and how I have frequently seen this lack of systemic change. It seems as though most people, myself included, move to create surface level action that simply acts as a Band-Aid to the larger issue. We see an aesthetic problem and we prefer to tackle that, whether out of a need to trick ourselves into thinking that a problem doesn’t exist or out of the belief that this is the most change that an individual can generate.
Neighborhood cleanup
Either way it seems as though the push for systemic, practical change is largely left in the lands of a smaller, more powerful group of individuals. This realization led to a lengthy stage of frustration and fatigue for my group because it seemed as though every idea that we generated seemed to resonate the same underlying issue.
Ultimately we were able to generate a project that attempts to create systemic improvement in the waste management local food businesses in presenting them with a viable, cost-effective alternative. However if I could go back I wish that we had started this project with a systematic outcome in mind from the start, as it would have greatly expedited our progress and made for a lot less frustration along the road.