By Nikki Saint Bautista

When you think of your environment, what do you see? I imagine myself walking out the front door and facing the morning traffic on the Staten Island Expressway. I hear the farting noises the trucks and buses make as they climb the ramp off the service road. A plane whizzes by and the ground bumbles. Exactly fifteen steps from my front door take me beyond the front lawn onto the sidewalk. If I walk west along the service road, I hit a patch of trees, a mini-forest the size of two blocks by two blocks. If I continue walking northwest I hit a bigger patch of trees with a small farm the size of one of those new developments that cram twelve homes on what had been a plot for two moderate-sized detached houses. If I walk east from my front door, I would dodge some dog poop, step on sputum, or broken glass, on my way to Willowbrook Park where there is a pond, gaggles of giggling geese and a carousel. Between my house and the park is one campus of the many within City University of New York and a public library. There is a Starbucks, a bank, a strip mall with horrible neon lights, cars honking and breaks screeching as they approach the one stoplight with a camera. There are no bike lanes or permission for riding bikes inside the park. There are no green markets nearby, only fast food chains and mom-and-pop shops that use I Can’t Believe It’s not Butter.

Edward S. Casey wrote, “Just as place is animated by the lived bodies that are in it, a lived place animates these same bodies as they become implaced there.” There is a relationship between the place beyond my front door and myself that is reciprocal in its nature. When I’m not walking around, I am sitting in one of the farting express buses with other people heading to school, work or to a change of busied scenery— from crowded mall parking lot to the flooding river of Times Square; from South Shore mansion to Little Italy or smoke shops on Christopher Street.

Do we consider ourselves travelers or commuters on really long escalators that sometimes work? The point of escalators is to get you to the top faster. The point of cars is to get you there faster without getting wet. The point of an even bigger vehicle is to assuage that displacing break from private property as soon as you move beyond your front lawn and move onto  the realm of public space, or the vehicle is used to fit more groceries.

Where do groceries come from? A warehouse. A slaughterhouse. A farm. Not like the mini-farm in the mini-forest by my house where a man in his 60s rakes and plucks at the earth every few days. If you shop at the bigger chains, the products come from bigger farms animated by the lived bodies of migrant workers or eco-conscious college students when they are “taking a break from school.” A French-tipped mani-pedi wouldn’t last a day at a farm even if gloves were worn. If we each took turns growing produce in our mani-pedied backyards or front lawns, would the number of obese Americans still outnumber the amount of fat Americans ? We have to take turns because we have not yet given ourselves enough time to balance debt and eat healthy.

It’s not butter and it’s not O.K. It’s not O.K. to lie to ourselves about eating better by eating diet or substituting the real deal for something “just like it.” The body is starved for nutrition but abundant in calories. The practice of pushing agriculture away from my dinner table to China, or canning fish fillet from Lake Victoria in Africa reminds me of the childhood bully who steals his classmate’s lunch, who now has nothing to eat . My relationship to the space of my dinner table relates to the Tanzanian fisherman who can’t afford his own catch.

Toaster not working? Toss it out and buy a new one; our political and economic , environment demands us. Once tossed, the toaster will end up in a landfill in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio or Virginia . The traveling toaster! Once upon a time beyond my front door, my nostrils collapsed shut into the septum to block the stench of the landfill. Today the landfill is being transformed into a “green space” complete with bike trails, open water for canoeing, a memorial site for 9/11 (and mafia victims). Land is often recycled in surprising ways. What was once a riverbed through which fish migrated was turned into a landfill, was turned into a park and memorial site, which might be sold to a developer who will build a parking lot for the grocery, gourmet toaster shop or housing community.