Values and value. Or how do our values affect our waste?

I was speaking today at a forum about the importance of values in our organisation, noting that our values are all internalised. We don't do signs (you know, "Please wash up your dishes", "Please turn off the lights", and in fact, that's kind of one of the values. We trust each other to get it.

This thinking can be transferred to waste. Waste really is a collective set of values that, I believe, permits us to turn away from our destruction. Engineering better landfills or incinerators kind of misses the point. The act of destruction is perpetrated when we, collectively, decide it isn't worth sustaining that material any more.

I believe that we suffer a little death whenever we make this decision, a little death that is easiest dealt with by closing our eyes to it, and by telling ourselves little stories to make it better. "The landfill is best practice" we say. "There will be no environmental impacts" we tell ourselves.

The story is only accepted because it is both implausible and deeply comforting. We want to believe it, we need to believe it, and so we do. This is how we construct our values to permit our lifestyle to continue.

I don't write this to send you, the reader, down a guilt trip. It isn't intended to tell you that you can no longer use your bin lest you go to hell. Rather, it is to encourage a rethink of your part in our collective values, which may in turn lead to a movement which can ultimately lead to change.

Slavery was abolished in this way. Slavery was deeply entrenched in society, necessary for it to maintain itself, and built off the lie that slaves are sub-human, or that the slaves are better looked after enslaved than free. That lie was challenged, and the values system built off it collapsed.

I believe rethinking the values enables us to challenge those who sustain the status quo. They will say there is no other way. Perhaps not as they have framed the problem. And so the problem needs to be reframed. Its boundaries expanded, new questions asked.

I realise this is no prescription for action, but like my organisation, it isn't a matter of signs. You just have to get it, and then live it, and then things start to fall into place around you.