Tell Me How You Treat Your Leftovers
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Marketing Sustainability and Ethics
16 January 2026

If my views on ecocentrism and anthropocentrism were my family at the dinner table, it would be loud, slightly chaotic and probably arguing about leftovers. In my family’s mix of habits, the American instinct is to clear them away, the Dutch instinct is to save tomorrow’s work lunch, and the Mexican instinct is to turn them into a different dish and somehow stretch it far enough to invite more people.

Growing up between Mexico, the United States, the Netherlands, South Africa, and now living in the United Kingdom, I did not develop one clear environmental worldview. I developed several, shaped by culture, generation, and necessity. Some of them are deeply ecocentric, some unapologetically anthropocentric, and some extremely good at adapting depending on context.

Mexico is where my strongest ecocentric values come from, and they are rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, including those of my non-biological mother. In these worldviews, nature has inherent value and is understood as something humans belong to, not something they dominate. This aligns closely with ecocentrism as defined in environmental ethics and Indigenous environmental philosophy (Whyte, 2018).

In the Mexican households that shaped me, making a little go a long way was not framed as sustainability or sacrifice. It was simply common sense. A yogurt pot is reused as a cup, then for soap, then for storage, and eventually as a plant pot. Waste is avoided not because of environmental guilt, but because there are more important things in life. Time with people. Family. Community. What stayed with me was the value placed on human relationships over material accumulation.

The pride I encountered in Mexico’s land, biodiversity and food traditions was just as important. The tensions around trade and changing consumption provide a wider context (Wise, 2019), but for me the environmental connection was personal: people holding tightly to what they valued, nail and tooth, and with pride.

By contrast, the United States shaped my anthropocentric side very efficiently. So much of the life I encountered was organised around human comfort, convenience, and speed. Big vehicles, constant air conditioning, disposable plates and cutlery at gatherings. Nature exists, but mostly as a backdrop once human needs are met. This reflects a strongly anthropocentric worldview where nature is valued primarily for its usefulness to humans (Oxford Reference, 2024). I will admit, guiltily, that it felt incredibly easy. Anthropocentrism works very well when you are the one being centred.

From the Netherlands, influenced by my Dutch grandmother and my baby boomer father, I learned a far more pragmatic approach. Nature is respected because it must be. In a country so closely associated with water management, ecological limits are difficult to treat as an abstraction. The habits I inherited emphasised efficiency, reuse and long-term planning: practical responsibility rather than a performance of virtue.

South Africa added another critical layer to my understanding. Nature is powerful, present, and deeply intertwined with history and inequality. Environmental protection often exists alongside communities that have not equally benefited from conservation efforts. This highlighted that ecocentrism without social justice risks becoming exclusionary, a concern widely acknowledged in global sustainability and development literature (UNDP, 2021).

Now, living in the United Kingdom, my host country, I notice an ongoing negotiation between ecocentric values and anthropocentric habits. Environmental concern is visible around me, but convenience, consumption and comfort remain deeply embedded in everyday life. To me, it feels as though values sometimes shift faster than behaviours.

As a member of my generation, raised by older generations who experienced scarcity, reuse, and long-term thinking, I sit somewhere between these perspectives. I believe deeply in ecocentrism, particularly the lessons I encountered in Mexico and through Indigenous family relationships about nature and human connection. At the same time, I am honest about how tempting anthropocentrism can be when it comes packaged as comfort, ease, and air conditioning.

My worldview is that of a mutt. It is inherited, cultural, and occasionally contradictory. But if my dinner table metaphor teaches anything, it is this: how we treat leftovers says a lot about how we treat the planet.