Changemaker Meeting | February
On February 25th at 13:30 GMT our Changemaker community gathered and held a community discussion around the EcoResolution topic, Waste & Consumerism. With a focus on Plastic Waste in the Asia Pacific Region, we discuss the complexity of our global plastic crisis, and how colonialism, globalisation, and consumerism entwine to create this ecological disaster. Led by Satyarupa Shekhar from Break Free From Plastic, this was an emotive and provocative conversation around the individual and systemic roots of plastic waste, false solutions, and the potential for waste-free communities. Following a conversation, we close with a wellbeing practice led by Nici Harrison from The Grief Space, who discusses the practice of grief tending and how grief has many manifestations. Scroll down to watch recordings from the meeting, and to read more about our topic, our guests, and a list of learning resources.
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Plastic Waste Crisis with Satyarupa Shekhar | Break Free From Plastic
Meet Satyarupa Shekhar
Satyarupa provides overall leadership and coordination in the Asia Pacific region for the development of holistic and inclusive strategies to dramatically reduce plastic production, pollution, and usage. She works with and supports frontline communities and organizations – leaders in their right – working to promote sustainable, effective, and locally-driven initiatives.
Prior to joining BFFP, Satyarupa has worked with policy research and advocacy groups to make visible communities and issues that remain invisible to and neglected by governments and the general public.
She has worked with Chennai’s city government and a Tamil Nadu state department to improve their data-management practices to plan civic infrastructure better, institute zero-waste systems and single-use plastic ban, and has supported the creation of data that has been used by the city government and courts to provide evidence for failures in service provision.
Satyarupa holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Hyderabad, and a European Masters in Law and Economics degree.
“It is quite frequently that we come across articles and papers that declare the Asia Pacific region as the biggest contributor to ocean plastic. Labelling these countries as polluters is both facetious and inaccurate. For decades, Global North businesses have used plastic in their products, packaging, and delivery despite knowing that no feasible and viable ways to collect and process the material post-consumer use exist.” - Satyarupa
What is Break Free From Plastic?
The goal of Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) is to bring systemic change through a holistic approach tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain, focusing on prevention rather than cure, and providing effective solutions.
The #breakfreefromplastic Movement is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 11,000 organizations and individual supporters from across the world have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and to push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the common values of environmental protection and social justice, and work together through a holistic approach in order to bring about systemic change under the #breakfreefromplastic core pillars. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain - from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions.
Grief Tending with Nici Harrison | The Grief Space
Meet Nici and The Grief Space
Nici Harrison is founder of The Grief Space offering individual sessions, group grief circles, retreats, and workshops. Nici’s work to remember the lost art of grief tending and to create a space where grief can be deeply acknowledged, witnessed and welcomed. She believes that, in time, grief brings us closer to the raw and vulnerable wonder of being alive. We emerge with the capacity to hold it all - love and loss, grief and gratitude, life and death. Nici’s heart’s path is to share all that she has learned about nurturing a reverence for grief as a way to heal and love more fully. Nici is changing the narrative around grief, having been featured publicly, including The Telegraph and Psychologies Magazine and multiple festivals.
“Since my early twenties, I have been on a wild apprenticeship with grief. It has been my deepest despair and constant companion, but without a doubt my greatest teacher.”
“We are told to get up and get on, to deny our feelings and distract ourselves senseless. When in reality, our grief needs to be seen, acknowledged, heard and loved. My heart’s path is to share all that I have learned about nurturing a reverence for grief, loss and ultimately life itself. Through this project The Grief Space, we offer individual sessions, grief circles, retreats and workplace workshops.”
Welcome to The Grief Space
The Grief Space is remembering the lost art of grief tending where we create space for grief to be deeply acknowledged, witnessed and welcomed. We offer to be your companion in grief, to walk beside you as you navigate this unfamiliar terrain. Through presence and compassion, we allow space for grief to move fluidly rather than getting stuck, creating the possibility for alchemy and integration. In time, we gradually see how grief brings us closer to the raw and vulnerable wonder of being alive. We emerge with the capacity to hold it all - love and loss, grief and gratitude, life and death.
What is Grief Tending?
“In many cultures across the world, we have largely forgotten how to grieve. We reject the knowledge that grief is an inevitable part of the human experience and we see sorrow as something to get through or overcome.”
“Grief tending is the antidote to this solitary burden. Originating from the root word ‘tenderness’, grief tending invites us to bring compassion and kindness to our grief. Together, we embrace the understanding that grief cannot be fixed, and instead recognise how grief longs to be cared for and welcomed. Grief tending invites you to welcome all expressions of your grief; anger, guilt, sadness, despair, numbness and loneliness to name just a few.
“In the Guatemalan Tz’utujil language the word for ‘grief’ and ‘praise’ are the same, because you can only grieve what you have dearly loved. It is with this awareness that grief becomes something that we learn to embrace; something we can integrate into all of who we are.
“Grief tending also invites us to come together in community, and be seen in our grief. For too long, sorrow and loss have been hidden behind closed doors when in truth grief needs to be seen and witnessed.
“As we remember how to tend to our grief, we start to recognise, as poet Kahlil Gibran said, that the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Grief tending supports us to emerge with the capacity to hold it all; love and loss, grief and gratitude and life and death.”
Recommended Watch
We don't "move on" from grief. We move forward with it | Nora McInerny
What do we mean when we talk about Waste and Consumerism?
Waste is perhaps, on the surface, one of the easiest problems to picture and understand: images of plastic waste in our water and industrial waste in our skies have become synonymous with communications of environmental degradation. However, whilst these striking visuals may capture our attention, convince us to recycle, or even encourage us to collect the litter we see, our waste problem currently runs far deeper.
Environmentally, waste is polluting our land, water, air, and even our bodies. Waste related greenhouse gas emissions are anticipated to reach 2.6 billion tonnes by 2050 and even waste which we think we have recycled is increasingly being sent to landfill or is illegally burned. As well as contributing to climate change, this mass production of waste impacts the biodiversity of our planet.
Socially, much of the waste generated in wealthier regions ends up in landfills in poorer areas. Toxic fumes from garbage fires, microplastics in the water, and landslides severely damage the health and livelihoods of the people who spend their lives surrounded by these masses of waste, predominantly already marginalised communities.
Much of our waste is a result of our ‘throwaway culture’, the poor lifespan of products, and ultimately, the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ which we consume on a daily basis. This is due to the phenomenon of Consumerism. Consumerism is not only fuelling our global waste problem, but is linked to social issues such as mental health crises and low life satisfaction, as we constantly feel a pressure to accumulate more stuff.
Together, waste and consumerism are both parts of what is often called our ‘Take, Make, Waste’ society, where we rapidly take our planet’s limited resources, convert them into consumer products, then rapidly discard them. This system needs to change, drastically.
You can read more about Waste and Consumerism on our EcoResolution site, including The History of Consumerism, What Really Happens to your Plastic Recycling, or this more in-depth exploration Connecting Capitalism to Colonialism from Alnoor Ladha.
Recommended Resources
Watch
— The Story Of Stuff [link] - The Story of Stuff Project
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The film exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. We love this film at EcoResolution. Find out more here: http://storyofstuff.org
— Cara Delevingne interviews Annie Leonard on Plastics, the Fossil Fuel Industry and Systems Change [here]
In April 2020, EcoResolution co-founder, model and actress Cara Delevingne interviewed Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA's Executive Director after a virtual screening of the new documentary, The Story Of Plastic. In this lively and illuminating conversation, Cara and Annie discuss waste, consumerism, and the need to ‘turn off the tap’ of plastic production.
— The High Price of Materialism [link]
Psychologist Tim Kasser discusses how America's culture of consumerism undermines our well-being. Despite being over 10 years old, the damaging effects of materialism are as evident as ever. When people buy into the ever-present marketing messages that "the good life" is "the goods life," they not only use up Earth's limited resources, but they are less happy and less inclined toward helping others. The animation both lays out the problems of excess materialism and points toward solutions that promise a healthier, more just, and more sustainable life.
— Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things [link]
“By incorporating minimalism into our lives, we’ve finally been able to find lasting happiness—and that’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it? We all want to be happy. Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself; thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous in your life.”
Following The Minimalist, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, this documentary examines minimalism and what this looks like by exploring the lives of minimalists from various walks of life.
Articles
— ‘Waste colonialism’: world grapples with west’s unwanted plastic - The Guardian
“The year-long saga of these 141 containers is a small slice of the international trade in plastic waste, the ugly underbelly of recycling in the global north. Plastic waste, especially mixed plastic from households, is frequently sent overseas to countries with lax environmental regulations, where it is melted into plastic pellets, dumped, or simply burned.”
— Connecting the Dots: Plastic pollution and the planetary emergency - Environmental Investigation Agency Report January 2022
“The toxic pollution resulting from rampant overproduction of virgin plastics and their lifecycles is irreversible, directly undermines our health, drives biodiversity loss, exacerbates climate change, and risks generating large-scale harmful environmental changes.” Read the full report here on plastic pollution and this planetary crisis.
Read
— Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism (Aja Barber)
In the 'learning' first half of the book, Barber highlights the endemic injustices in our consumer industries and the oppressive systems which have emerged from and fuelled rampant consumption. She reveals how we spend our money and whose pockets it goes into and whose it doesn't. In the second 'unlearning' half of the book, Barber reckons with the uncomfortable truth behind why we consume the way we do, confronting the feeling of never quite being enough and the reasons why we fill this void with consumption rather than compassion.
— The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves (J.B. MacKinnon)
“We can’t stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma. The economy says we must always consume more. The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the earth’s resources at a rate five times faster than it can regenerate. And despite efforts to “green” our consumption—by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power—we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions.”
Addressing this paradox head-on, acclaimed journalist J.B. MacKinnon asks, What would really happen if we simply stopped shopping?