Public Space

Over the holiday I went shopping with my little sister. Normally I do not do any shopping, unless I need something very specific, or am inspired to browse the dress section at Goodwill. I definitely do not go in malls, especially of the strip variety. But quite a few people gave me gift certificates for Christmas, and unfortunately they were for places I would never go of my own volition- Barnes and Noble and Borders. There’s actually a funny story there but that isn’t the point of this entry.

While in one of these places, I started thinking about bathrooms. If you are in the middle of a city, ninety percent of the time there is no place to pee. Think about it. All the bathrooms are locked up in people’s houses, or in restaurants that won’t let you pee unless you are a “patron”. We had this problem over the summer during Artscape, when the lines for the portable bathrooms were horrendous, and the heat made them impossible to get near anyway. Where in heavens name are you supposed to pee?

You may be wondering how this relates to the environment, but think about it for a minute. When did this become an issue? When did it become illegal to pee wherever you could, behind a bush, on a tree, what have you? (Also, why is it so satisfying to pee outside behind a bush when you’re camping?) In Europe, you even have to pay to use the public bathrooms (which leads to some inventive methods of getting around the system, let me tell you).

One of our biggest expenses, or at least for most of us, is for space. Simply to have space to live, we shell out several hundred dollars per month. Sometimes several thousand. For- space? (We call it rent.) This really seems illogical, if you start to think about it. When this country was first settled, you could tramp out to the Midwest and drop yourself down and call it your own. You wouldn’t imagine paying anyone for the land, so long as you could survive on it. (I am temporarily ignoring the fact that there were in fact people living there already.)

This has led us to become rather possessive of our space. This is my space. This is your space. Do not cross the line into my space. But what of the other spaces? Could this be the source of some of our inaction so far as environmental degradation to the ocean, or the air? It’s not “our” space, after all. We didn’t pay for it. Someone else will deal with it.

But our spaces intertwine- the air and water from neighboring spaces have an effect on what happens in your space, frequently invading in the form of rain and wind and temperature changes- the natural world disregards boundaries such as property lines, which are irrelevant when it comes to the natural course of a breeze. And why is it that we pay such attention to them? How is it that we’ve come to find it acceptable that we have to pay for space to live, and frequently find ourselves without a place to pee? It certainly doesn’t make much sense to me.