Talking trash
In which our Southern gentleman discards polite conversation to neatly lay waste to the junk arguments of those who would embrace rubbish recycled as truth.
The time has come to settle the matter: Does putting out the bins come under the umbrella of gardening or does it not? Sociologists remain divided. Professor Dennett of Waikato is old school and emphatic. “The two activities are entirely unrelated. Creating and disposing of rubbish is an indoor thing and gardening an outdoor one,” he says. “That the bins pass through the garden en route to the public street on collection day is a mere geographical necessity bereft of significance. You don’t need to be a professor of sociology to observe that people love gardening and hate putting the bins out. Where gardening brings a smile, the bins evoke a sigh of resignation. So common sense answers your question.”
Bumfield of Otago, however, who is not yet a professor but definitely a rising star, disagrees. “Professor Dennett’s approach,” he says, “may have been all very well 50 years ago but putting out the bins in the 1970s was a different business to putting out the bins today. Back then, all household refuse went into a single bin bag, which was then tied at the top to keep the possums out and the stench in. That bag, in its undifferentiated entirety, went straight to the landfill. Such a process did indeed have little to do with gardening. But that was then and this is now and these days both the practice and the psychology of waste disposal have changed entirely.
“Consider,” continues Bumfield, “the Christchurch City Council’s slogan, Love Your Rubbish. Fifty years ago it would have been meaningless, but today it reflects a local, national and indeed global mindset that sees human activity as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. We belong to a single vast ecosystem in which matter is neither created nor destroyed but merely recycled in one form or another. Gardeners, of course, have always known that. The putters out of bins are learning it. Increasingly the two activities are converging. A neglected garden turns wild; a neglected house runs with vermin. For all our belonging to the natural world, we can no longer exist in a state of nature. We are liminal creatures who create and occupy a halfway land between wilderness and sterility. It follows then that gardening and binning are both expressions of our innate humanity, twin facets of the same muddied coin.”
“Pfui,” exclaims Dennett with one of his trademark snorts. “Bumfield by name, Bumfield by nature. This is just the sort of pretentious fluffery that gives sociology a bad reputation. The man is blind to the obvious. Putting out the bins is an evacuative necessity. Gardening is a creative delight. There are clubs devoted to gardening. There are no clubs devoted to rubbish disposal. There is nothing to yoke the two activities together. Ask yourself this: if a writer submitted an article to a specialist gardening magazine on the subject of the sociology of putting out the bins, what do you think would happen? Precisely. He or she would be ridiculed and pilloried from here to the herbaceous borders. Case closed.”
“On reflection,” says Bumfield, stroking his chin, “the professor may have a point.”