Visions and San Francisco's Zero Waste Initiative

The edge of the Santo Domingo landfill in the Dominican Republic

As mentioned in class today, San Francisco has established a vision and goal to become a zero waste city. I'm excited to see that they aren't doing this simply by installing more recycling centers, but are working toward cutting down consumption and beefing up reuse and composting programs. Most would say that their goal to be waste free desirable but not feasible, however, they are taking strides to prove those doubters wrong.


In my journey through studying sustainable initiatives, I've noticed that when we approach sustainability issues we frequently get stuck in the potential problems we see arising rather than stating exactly what it is we would like to see (as Prof. Brown put it we tend to look for desperational solutions not aspirational). In a course I took last Spring we were assigned to draft a vision for the future state of a system. It was like pulling teeth for us to put pen to paper on our ideas because we kept tripping up on the details. "But the technology might not be available".."But this might raise the costs of other forms of transportation".. We didn't realize that the vision wasn't the plan, but simply a desired end state to guide the plan.

Kristen touched on this today when she brought up the idea of addressing population. Because we don't know how to solve such a touchy subject, we frequently choose to not even bring the vision itself to the table. We're afraid to say that we want to see population at manageable levels, even though this is something about which everyone is concerned. This doesn't mean that by stating that vision we must institute Draconian law that we will kill second borns. Perhaps this will come about through other circumstances (a manageable population, not killing children), as Natalie mentioned, or through round-about incentives that can be provided to make bearing less children economically desirable (like removing subsidies on industrial agriculture that cheapens food like crazy). The point is that we can't be afraid to say what we desire simply because we can't see the pathway to success at this moment.

Envisioning the ultimate goal provides a challenging and much needed exercise for thinking about the ideal and what the ultimate purpose of our investment is. Without knowing what it is we want to attain, how do we know what we're working towards? Perhaps we are too afraid we will fall short of that vision that we prefer to pretend we don't have these desires in the first place. Thankfully for us we have groups like the city of San Francisco who aren't afraid to dream big and attempt to implement their visions that can inspire us to do the same.