rag and bone men

(Chapter 2, Roseland, Sustainable community development: integrating environmental, economic, and social objectives)

It strikes me as very counterintuitive that poverty is commonly held culpable for unsustainable environmental practices. Last year I traveled to Buenos Aires very briefly for work, and in addition to the tourist sites we passed, my coworkers pointed out a lot of symptoms of the economic meltdown their country experienced a few years before.

One example that struck me was a host of homeless men and women sifting through the garbage for recyclables. Of course, their existence must have been terrible, as I can't imagine the profit margin on trash is very high. But at the same time, it made me think for a long time after about how abject poverty gives meaningful value to everything a society produces. That is, when you have no reason to value an empty aluminum can (say, because you are a millionaire) there is no reason not to toss it out (unless you are morally persuaded to recycle it). However, if the few pennies you get for reclaiming it means you eat a full meal that day, you will of course sift through the discarded treasure of the strata of society economically above you. I do tend to (cynically? Economics is by definition cynical) believe that building in economic advantages to a action is more effective than simple moral suasian, but it doesn't sit well.

I think it was an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for rag and bone men (linked to Wikipedia here, though not the exact definition I remember) that said the men traveled town to town collecting rags and burnt charcoal and bones from fires--basically trash, but they refashioned the refuse into useable items. I had conflicting thoughts about how great that was (nothing wasted), and how awful it was (to live under the constant the social stigma of scavenging).