This essay is the first piece in the “Commons for Whom?” series, which investigates the role of identity, ethnicity, accessibility, and coloniality in the politics of the commons. Inspired by the ASLE + AESS 2023 conference theme “Reclaiming the Commons,” our series “Commons for Whom?” especially engages the implicit “we” in calls to reclaim common, public, and outdoor spaces. “Commons for Whom?” is a collaborative, cross-platform series, published across Edge Effects, NiCHE, and Correspondences. Series editors: Addie Hopes (NiCHE), Ben Iuliano (Edge Effects), Rebecca Laurent (Edge Effects), Weishun Lu (Edge Effects), Kelly McKisson (Correspondences), and Richelle Wilson (Edge Effects).
I’m sitting cross-legged on a cement ledge, leaning against the exterior wall of a laundromat. I notice that I’ve unpurposely plopped my body beneath a sign stating “NOTICE / NO LOITERING ALLOWED.” It seems I am not supposed to sit here, but I stay put. The ledge I’m sitting on leads into a sidewalk, with cement articulated in cracks, accented by little leafy things of cellulose and cigarette butts of cellulose acetate. There’s also a BAND-AID® and a red plastic straw with teeth marks at the tip. I notice no signs stating PLEASE DON’T LITTER / HELP KEEP YOUR COMMUNITY CLEAN.
Our public spaces—sidewalks, streets, parks, national parks—are punctuated by signs such as the one I am sitting beneath. These signs delineate boundaries, direct behavior, and denote who and what is permitted or prohibited. There are signs locating bathrooms and buses, signs labeling zones with WiFi or with wildlife crossings, signs barring fireworks or firearms, and signs prohibiting smoking or prescribing six feet of social distance. There are also frequent signs forbidding loitering or littering. And as I recline amid the rubbish, the two words, loiter and litter—alike in more than their alliteration—started rolling around in my mouth. Both seem to suggest something about who and what has been designated as unfit for public spaces.
loiter [ loi-ter ], verb
1. to delay an activity with idle stops and pauses: DAWDLE
2. a. to remain in an area for no obvious reason
b. to lag behind
The meanings of loiter are multiple, as are the implications. Loitering is considered impolite, and in some contexts, illegal. Loitering laws have origins in Medieval England, where loitering has been legislated in some sense since 1342. During the Jim Crow Era, vagrancy laws were introduced in nine US states, some of which included loitering as a violation. These included a law in Georgia that prohibited “wandering or strolling about in idleness” and a law in Kentucky that permitted “persons guilty of . . . loitering or rambling without a job to be arrested.”[1] Beginning with the 1972 lawsuit Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, some loitering laws have since been changed, challenged for being overly broad.[2] While many current loitering laws claim to have the intention of limiting behaviors considered criminal, such as drug use or sex work (both of which would benefit from decriminalization), the overbreadth of these laws has allowed for their abuse.
Ross Gay writes, “the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering.’”[3] While 12% of Americans are Black, according to the 2020 census, Black Americans made up 30% of loitering arrests in the United States in 2019. In the United States, loitering laws have long been used to control and criminalize Black, brown, poor, queer, femme, and disabled bodies. Consider the case of Christian Cooper, a Black man who was bird watching in Central Park, when Amy Cooper, a white woman of no relation, called the police on him. This is one of countless examples of Black, brown, poor, queer, femme, and disabled bodies being policed for simply existing in public space. These are not the bodies that our public spaces have been built for, or as Marya T. Mtshali puts it, The Great Outdoors Was Made for White People.
Though, Gay continues, “a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception” and might allow someone to exist in a public space, perhaps loitering, without penalty. It is the attire of those that our public spaces have been built for. Patagonia primarily produces apparel and accessories intended for outdoor activities. And though internal audits revealed human trafficking in its supply chain as recently as 2011, the likely case for any retailer reliant on the global supply chain, the retailer is more regularly extolled for its environmental activism. Perhaps related to this is Patagonia’s association with an environmentalist aesthetic, even as the apparel is often worn outside of the particular outdoor activities it was originally intended for. Many consider the clothing comfortable, some consider it chic, and some others correlate it with a certain social consciousness. The recreation-ready apparel is practical, if pricey, and is suggestive of privilege and proficiency in things outdoorsy. It is what I perceive to be the “proper” attire of a (white) environmentalist. Though perhaps I’m over assuming the sartorial effect of a Synchilla® Snap-T® Fleece Pullover. Notably, many of the Patagonia jackets, such as the aforementioned Synchilla® Snap-T® Fleece Pullover, are 100% polyester. It is estimated that around 35% of the microplastic pollution found in our oceans is in the form of synthetic microfibers. The semblance of an environmentalist aesthetic collides with the substantialness of synthetic textiles such as polyester as the largest single source of marine microplastic pollution.
Our public spaces, particularly those that are considered some sort of natural, such as parks and national parks, are supposed to be pristine. Pristine implies that these places should not be filled with plastic—micro or macro—debris. Pristine implies that these places are not naturally full of people, and that people are distinct from, perhaps inherently destructive to, nature—though as all national parks are on lands originally occupied by Indigenous people, maintaining such public spaces as pristine is a myth-making process that necessarily means the erasure of particular peoples. Pristine also implies an etiquette of not littering.
litter [ lit-er ], verb
1. BED
2. to give birth to a litter of (young)
3. a. to strew with scattered articles
b. to scatter about in disorder
c. to lie about in disorder
d. to mark with objects scattered at random
The meanings of litter are likewise multiple, as are the implications. And littering is likewise considered impolite, and in some contexts, illegal. US laws on littering are relatively recent. Following the formation of the anti littering campaign Keep America Beautiful in 1953, states started instituting laws on littering in the late 1950s. Now all states have some sort of littering law with penalties ranging from the imposition of fines to imprisonment. The Keep America Beautiful campaign was formed by a coalition of industry and government, among whom were Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company. Its focus was not on industry but on individuals, not on decreasing production but on proper disposal, and not on reducing consumption but on the “right” consumption, i.e. a Patagonia-esque political correctness. The campaign included a series of public service announcements, some of which have since been criticized for their racist under/over tones. One of these PSAs stars the character Susan Spotless, a white girl wearing a white dress. In one scene, she is walking in a park with adults, presumably her parents, when she stops to pick up a plastic bag and place it in a trash can. As she does, the narrator states, “Every litter bit thoughtlessly dropped, blemishes a bit of America.”
Our public spaces, particularly those such as parks and national parks, are spaces preserved for particular notions of nature. In parks this likely includes expanses of Kentucky bluegrass, benches, and some playground equipment made of high density polyethylene and galvanized steel finished with a baked-on polyester dry powder coating. In national parks this likely includes scenic driving routes, trails, and campsites. Such public spaces also tend to be equipped with trash cans, or in more remote parts, a Leave No Trace ethos. Leave No Trace principles include the practice of “Pack it in, Pack it out,” which instructs us to collect, contain, and carry with us our power bar packaging, orange peels, and toilet paper. It is trash to be thrown away elsewhere.
Though, there isn’t really such a thing as “away.” We can disavow our trash. We can disremember our trash. But that trash still exists. And around 75% of that trash does not biodegrade.[4] While some of our trash sits along sidewalks and streets or swims along streams as litter, the trash that is thrown away is most often buried or burned. The trash that is buried in landfills and burned in incinerators often causes contamination to water and air. And trash is most likely to be buried and burned in low income communities and/or communities of color. In the early 1990s, more than 35 Native American reservations were targeted as sites for landfills, incinerators, and other hazardous waste facilities. Of the 72 municipal waste incinerators still operating within the United States (this does not include incinerators for hazardous waste, hospital, medical, and infectious waste, or commercial and industrial solid waste), most are located in low income communities and/or communities of color.
There’s a lot of trash to be buried and burned, particularly in the United States. In the mid-twentieth century, the EPA began collecting data on US waste generation. Since 1960, municipal solid waste generated has increased every year, except in recession years. In 1960, the United States generated 88.1 million tons of MSW, or 2.68 pounds per person per day; and in 2018, the United States generated 292.4 million tons of MSW, or 4.9 pounds per person per day.[5] High-income countries, such as the United States, tend to generate more waste per person. While accounting for 4% of the world’s population, the United States generates 12% of the world’s MSW. And an increasing percentage of the waste generated is plastic. 10 billion tons of plastic have been generated, around 6 billion tons of which is now in landfills. Much of the plastic trash generated gets exported, with more than a quarter of a billion tonnes exported since 1988. And around a third of these exports have come from the United States, Japan, and Germany. The trade, in both its legal and illegal forms, has allowed for high income, high consuming countries to offload the harms of plastic use to lower income, lower consuming countries.
This trade is the corrosive corollary to Coca-Cola’s Keep America Beautiful campaign. When trash is collected and contained in the way considered proper, it is offloaded onto low income communities and/or communities of color in the United States and abroad. Rather than reducing our rubbish, “no littering” merely means exporting it elsewhere. Where we decided to dispose of our trash is an indication of which places and peoples are considered preservation-worthy and which are considered pollutable. It seems that trash is only synonymous with litter when bestrewn in certain places built for certain peoples. Rather than emphasize suitable collection/containment of trash, it is essential to emphasize slowing/stopping/shifting the cycles of consumption. An emphasis ought to be placed on reducing production, reducing productivity, i.e. on working less, leisuring more, being purposely unproductive. It might require more time spent lingering, lazing, and lolling about. All of which, as Gay notes, are synonyms of loitering.
I see a grocery store ad gambol across asphalt, guided by a gust of wind. There’s a lid for a to-go container of BUTTERMILK RANCH flavored Classic Gourmet Dressing® and a downy feather from a bird’s underbelly. My body is still seated beneath the NOTICE / NO LOITERING ALLOWED sign. I have been privileged enough to be paid no mind, for though I am not wearing a Patagonia jacket, I am white. The two words—loiter and litter— similar in sound and sentiment, are still rolling around in my mouth. Both loitering and littering are considered impolite, and in some contexts, illegal. And both imply something about who and what has been designated as unwanted, unmanaged, and unseemly, something about who and what must be disappeared or disposed of. Both imply something about who and what our public spaces are for, about who and what matters, about who and what is matter considered out of place, when in public.
Madeleine Bavley is a queer ecologist residing in the American West, where she writes and works in the soil.
[1] Bonnie Kristian, “Ahmaud Arbery and the racist history of loitering laws,” The Week, 7 May 2020, https://theweek.com/articles/912977/ahmaud-arbery-racist-history-loitering-laws.
[2] Alex Aichinger, “Loitering Laws,” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1213/loitering-laws.
[3] Ross Gay, “Loitering is Delightful,” The Paris Review, 11 February 2019, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/loitering-is-delightful/.
[4] Tom Szaky, Outsmart Waste : The Modern Idea of Garbage and How to Think Our Way Out of It, Berrett-Koehler, 2014, p. 15.
[5] EPA, “National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, updated 3 December 2022, https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials#Generation.