There are few things that mess with what Peter Berger called the nomos more than a garbage strike. If social order is indeed an ongoing matter of moment-by-moment construction, then the deliberate (and very political) act of leaving uncollected garbage on the streets is the ultimate form of shaking up modern man’s taken-for-granted notions of […]
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The Artichoke Dance Company choreographs and performs a number of pieces about ocean plastics and waste. They are performing “Your Planet: The Human Mapping Project” this weekend, where seven dancers dressed in crocheted six-pack holders chart the journey trash takes as it leaves land sources and makes its way out to sea. Audience members will […]
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Gernot Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, argues in this New York Times Op-Ed that our individual efforts to recycle, use less water, or replace plastic bags with cloth sacks are merely token gestures. “The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action,” he writes. […]
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Geography is a science of earthly lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena. Waste and discards shape, are shaped by, and re/disappear in these landscapes, and it would seem that geography has taken notice. In the upcoming American Association of Geographer‘s Conference in New York this February (24-28th), there are no less than three separate panels planned […]
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Kim Severson, a journalist writing for The New York Times, has penned a provocative article entitled “At Vacant Homes, Foraging for Fruit” in the August 14, 2011 edition of the paper. Her musings on a new, “guerrilla-style harvest…taking shape” should interest readers of Discard Studies. Severson writes about a local dog-walker, Kelly Callahan, who works in […]
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Jersey City has been using federal grant dollars throughout the summer to install new solar-powered trash compactors. These garbage cans compact the trash deposited in them to one fifth of the original bulk. Impressively, this results in many fewer trips by local sanitation trucks to empty the receptacles. Additionally, the compacting process uses only clean, […]
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The Material World Blog has a post on two new books that may be of interest to our readers. The first is Paraphernalia by Steven Connor (London: Profile Books 2011): The delight of Paraphernalia is it is really a kind of literary equivalent of tipping out a person’s handbag or the back of their desk […]
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“Imagine coherence without consistency.” — John Law, After Method. If you start reading discard studies, you’ll come across the adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” in short order. This is more than a cliché: there is something about discards that is inherently contested, multiple and fragmented. Thus, discard scholars need methodologies that don’t […]
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Our dominant waste management practices are decidedly utopic, takings the “no place” of utopia’s etymology quite literally. To create a “good place” of clean, disease-free municipalities, trash is exiled to “no place,” an ideal “away” that effects and troubles no one (except, as course, as environmental justice advocates tell us, someone– usually someones who are poor and part of minority communities– lives in “no place “).
I recently watched a TV episode with The Garbage Collector, the anti-hero in an “environmental slasher film.” The Garbage Collector was a monstrous figure who lived in a landfill and seemed to battle bad guys even though it wasn’t clear whether he was a bad guy or good guy himself. This ambiguity seems to be […]
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