Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice ed. by Elizabeth Mazzolini and Stephanie Foote (review)

Garbage has found a growing niche in environmental and social discourse in recent years. Television shows like Hoarders and Pawn Stars, viral web videos like The Story of Stuff, and media reports on garbage patches and widespread food waste all alternately celebrate or bemoan our attachment to (and subsequent release of) material detritus. Histories of the Dustheap goes to the heart of that cultural infatuation by analyzing how the afterlife of our stuff can illuminate “the systems that sustain our culture’s fantasy of the good life” (p. 258). Rather than developing a common interdisciplinary definition of “garbage,” the editors have drawn together a set of essays that use garbage and waste to examine the complex and fluid relationships between nature and culture. Together, the chapters draw on disciplinary positions such as history, literature, and urban planning to demonstrate the need for what Richard Newman calls “geocriticism,” or the rejection of “environmental policies that divide the world into appropriate and inappropriate dumping grounds” (p. 32). In contrast, the volume’s essays advocate in favor of individual, community and systemic examinations of the production and consumption relationships that produce waste.

The result is an intriguing set of investigations into the multiple meanings of garbage, divided into three sections, each organized around a prominent material or symbolic aspect of waste. The first section considers the subjectivity of garbage using personal “toxic autobiographies” (autobiographical accounts of experiences with toxic waste) written by residents of communities impacted by toxic waste issues including Love Canal, NY and the Navajo Nation. Another chapter considers the role of emergent communities of bloggers (concerned about topics ranging living lives in a consumptive boundary of 100 miles to the potential environmental benefits of sleeping naked) by examining how bloggers construct identities through their management and discussions of waste. The second section focuses on the dumping grounds for garbage, from urban toxic waste in Bloomington, Indiana to the frozen trash and excrement of Mount Everest climbers. The authors fruitfully plumb the tension between the desire to put waste out of sight and the refusal of waste to stay hidden, in order to investigate the artificial separation of nature and culture. The final section examines the ideological contradictions of garbage in a consumer society to explore how profit motives affect both the disposal and depiction of waste, whether it is the revenue collected in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from processing the city’s sewage sludge into fertilizer (with dire environmental consequences) or debates over norms and attitudes toward the plastic shopping bags and beverage bottles that have become more common in daily life since the 1980s.

The question of individual roles and responsibilities in the face of systemic crises sits at the heart of the volume’s investigations. Garbage—its creation, its accumulation, its lingering effects—is often cast as an individual problem or, worse, an individual failing. Bad consumption choices, inappropriate disposal, the transport of garbage to less visible places (often occupied by poor, minority, or native communities that have less ability to make waste visible), or recommodification into another form (plastic bottles into fleece jackets or sewer sludge into fertilizer) all boil down, in this common narrative, to the poor choices of individuals. Garbage is thus framed not as a problem resulting from systems designed to encourage ever-increasing production and consumption that can only be addressed through large scale change but rather as a challenge that requires individuals to participate in waste hierarchies designed to “reduce, reuse and recycle” what is consumed.

In contrast to this common narrative, the authors in Histories of the Dustheap describe how various powerful interests are served by casting waste issues as individual rather than systemic problems. The authors problematize such constructions, showing for example that while the problem of waste left behind on Mount Everest has gained increasing attention in recent years, the mountain’s status as a global cultural and ecological icon faces far greater threats...