Zero Waste Is A Branch of My Ideal Feminism! Here's Why!

Days after the second anniversary of the women’s march, I’m remembering what it felt like a year ago to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with so many of my neighbors in Nashville, all of us marching in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington, and still all of us there for a different cause. Signs reading “Women’s rights are human rights” held up in the air alongside “Black Lives Matter,” “Love trumps hate,” “There is no planet B,” even “Sierra Club for gender equity.”  

For me, zero-waste is a daily form of protest, and it falls right in line with my feminism. The range of signs represented at the march are telling of that. The women’s march wasn’t my best example for this, as feminism without intersectionality is just white supremacy (these are not my words, I saw them on a protest sign!!), but as it is the largest recorded protest in history, it seems like the most relevant. Zero-waste isn’t a lifestyle choice, and it isn’t a cute project to post on social media about. It’s a movement that I choose to participate in daily for the sake of myself and my neighbors. I choose to participate because this is not just my world. My friends, my family, my neighbors—this earth is where they live. What can I do to ensure that these people I care so much about are granted the kind of world they so deserve?

I work at a non-profit that helps the children of migrant families get the most of their education. These migrant families travel around the U.S. in search of work, oftentimes in the fields of our earth, toiling away day in and day out to fill one bucket, then two, then 15, with tomatoes, tobacco, etc., just to earn a few dollars for the day before going to bed to wake up and do it all again. 

Sometimes my job looks like standard office work, but on the occasion that I get to chaperone a field trip or hear a story about a student who was finally able to understand that they will be able to achieve their dreams, I am reminded of some of those little ways I can help. All it takes is for me to think of these kids and their families, of what it would mean for my life if my parents were the ones on their hands and knees in the fields, breathing in pesticides, working as the smoke from the California wildfires creeps closer and closer, in the fields rain or shine, etc. It’s then that I am able to remember just how small actions add up.

Zero-waste is just an avenue of living in line with my feminism. Feminism—and by feminism, I mean intersectional or bust here—means rooting for the equal rights and opportunities of all people. With environmental racism and my own mindless waste production contributing to the preservation of that oppression, if I want to call myself a feminist—and I do, loudly and proudly—then I also need to try to lessen my own personal environmental impact and my own personal contributions to environmental racism.

I also need to understand what it means for my BIPOC friends and neighbors who are living and working in the midst of this oppression. Being complicit because of blissful ignorance is still being complicit, and I do not want to be on the side of complicity. I think many of us choosing to reduce our waste production could agree that we are hoping to be a part of a solution. And for me and many others, that solution is about more than just banning the plastic bag. It’s about making our world better for all the people that are in it.