Recently I watched an old episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive. I noticed in this episode, the hoarder continued to get emotional and even angered at the workers who were doing the job of putting the trash in the dumpster. She told the crew that she was an environmentalist and that metal should not be thrown away, it should be recycled.
Through out that episode, the footage of her home is, at some points, unbelievable. It's impossible to think that anyone lives there. She has rats and roaches, along with other creatures crawling around under all of her trash. In one part of the episode, it shows her walking into a room and literally having to climb up the junk like stairs. When her and the filming crew got into the room their heads were almost touching the ceiling.
My point is, I can not understand why/how people like this can say or convince themselves that they are environmentalist? The way the woman is living is not healthy. I completely understand that Hoarding/Being a hoarder is a mental disorder, but I do not understand this notion that she is being an environmentalist.
It sounds like rather than sending more trash or recyclables off to the landfill she has just turned her house into a landfill instead. This certainly puts a different spin on the "Not In My Backyard" issue of environmentalism. Perhaps she is the ultimate environmentalist, sacrificing her own living space to put an end to the consumer chain of disposal. Or maybe she's just a loon.
ReplyDeleteThat’ exactly what I was thinking. I’ve heard of the statement that “environmentalist are the ultimate hoarders” in a sense that environmentalist have a need to try to be caretakers of all they see, as well as that what they cannot see & seem as if they have a fear of running out of everything. But I wonder if this would be an example of the statement, or is she just loony like you said. She continued to say that the junk in her house was either going to be in a yard sale (but never had the yard sale), would be fixed up & put to use (but it was non-reparable), or that she felt like she would one day use it; or for some things she said they were “classics” & she refused to throw away “antiques” (but those items weren’t treated like antiques. She never gave a “real environmentalist” reason as to why all that junk was in her house for all of those years; it seemed like she was using that as an excuse. I just wonder if environmentalist would agree with what she’s doing.
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