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Bryce Tolpen's avatar

You've identified a problem I don't think about outside of my own home. Collective action would make me feel responsible for helping not just as an individual, as I was raised to do. Any collective action leads to community, of course, and that shift in orientation would help nascent community member identify and address other local problems.

I like how you move from collective action to longer-term solutions, including giving land back to First Nations. I began to identify the return of land as an issue for the same reason that I clean my plate -- a sense of individual guilt. But collective shame would be a better motivation, and it also would require community. Another motivation to give the land back to First Nations is their track record over millennia for effectively stewarding the world locally and collectively. I think it would require us to join these nations by adopting their kinship politics: this adoption would avoid reliance on the colonial trope of the noble savage and avoid the chimera of simply recreating the past. A indigenous approach seems to involve putting an entire culture behind such efforts as you address here as a byproduct of how these cultures relate to one another and to their part of the earth. Letting indigenous peoples take the lead and take back the land while becoming kin with them ourselves seems like both a daunting shift in collective understanding and the only lasting (self-sustaining) solution.

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Peck Gee Chua 蔡佩芝's avatar

Good piece. Specifically, this sentence really spoke to me “Capitalism has no waste management solution. Recycling is one of the biggest scam”. In fact many waste are exported to developing countries like Southeast Asia. Have you came across any books or other articles related to food waste or recycling that you could recommend?

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