Environmental problems are among the most profound challenges humanity has ever faced. Climate change, loss of biological diversity, fresh water scarcity, desertification, and the like undermine the quality of life for many and, in the extreme, weaken the organic infrastructure that supports all life on earth. How do we respond to such challenges? How can we steer in more sustainable directions? How can we fashion more ecologically sane and socially just ways of living that will respect the biophysical character of the earth?
The two books under review come at these questions from distinct perspectives, but arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. They argue for both nibbling at the edges of our current systems of unsustainability and undertaking wholesale transformation, albeit at different scales and scopes. Such dual strategies are key to the fashioning of environmentally sane paths.
Vivian Thomson dislikes trash. Americans daily throw away about 254 million tons (the equivalent of 4.6 lb./person-day [p. 13]), creating the problem of where to put it. While some trash is burned in incinerators, the majority ends up in landfills. Thomson's book focuses on the patterns of landfill waste disposal and what we can do to change them.
For much of US history, local municipalities and counties governed landfills. Communities generated garbage and disposed of it in landfills close to home. Safety and transport regulation thus varied across communities. In 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) empowered the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a national floor of environmental standards for landfills, and to provide states with technical assistance as they develop plans and regulations for solid waste facilities. Under RCRA, governing power over landfills rests with municipalities, but such power has to comply with state and federal standards. As a result, many small landfills were forced to close if they could not afford the upgrades necessary to meet new standards; in turn, the waste disposal industry has consolidated in the form of privately owned mega-landfills. Mega-landfills are enormous facilities that can be hundreds of feet tall and thousands of acres wide. Meeting more restrictive environmental standards, they have liners to protect the dispersion of dangerous materials, mechanisms to address leachate (the liquid that collects in landfills through rain infiltration and groundwater intrusion), and procedures for addressing methane accumulation and emission. But as Thomson highlights, such protections do not always work. Landfills are notorious for leaking heavy metals (such as mercury, lead, and cadmium), nutrients (such as nitrogen compounds), and organic substances that, in high concentrations, combine to form toxic stews and endanger surrounding areas.
A second consequence of RCRA and the emergence of mega-landfills is that trash is now transported across vast distances. With the closure of local dumps, towns and cities have had to seek waste disposal destinations far outside their municipalities. New York City, for instance, annually transports almost three million tons of trash to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other surrounding areas. (Thomson reminds us that until 1996, New York City disposed its garbage on Staten Island at Fresh Kills Landfill, which at more than two thousand acres, was allegedly the largest human-made feature on earth—more visible from space than the Great Pyramids and the Grand Coulee Dam [p. 25].) To many, long-distance transport of trash is a troubling dilemma insofar as it involves significant financial and ecological costs, while simultaneously transposing the dangers of waste disposal to communities not responsible for its generation. The author explains the dynamics of interstate trash transport, and the governance mechanisms used for its regulation. Moreover, she examines the environmental injustice of locating landfills in poor, politically weak communities of color.
Garbage In, Garbage Out proposes regulatory policies aimed at creating a more socially just and environmentally safe system for trash transportation. Thomson recommends taxes, strict regulation of toxic materials, surcharges for longer-distance hauling, and a commitment to the proximity principle, which values nearby disposal. But her goal is not simply to alter trash flows; it is to reduce waste generation in the first place. In the midst of addressing the politics of trash transportation, She concludes that the challenge is not one of movement but the sheer volume of trash produced in the United States. Americans generate a disproportionate amount of trash—for example, over 29% more solid waste than their Japanese or European counterparts (p. 52). To her, this is the fundamental problem, and it deserves our political attention. Thus, Thomson's policy prescriptions of increased scrutiny over, and financial penalties for, waste transport ultimately aim to pressure people to generate less waste.
Thomson's commitment to reduction in the amount of trash is welcome and important; it comes as a breath of fresh air within the policy literature on garbage transportation. Moreover, it digs beneath the surface of our trash transport problems in a normatively admirable manner. However, her strategy goes only so far.
Is the problem the amount of trash we generate or, more essentially, the very idea of garbage itself? “‘Trash’ is a relative concept” (p. 32), Thomson acknowledges, and she spends significant effort discussing and promoting recycling. However, she admits that at some point, what we throw away is no longer useful and must be buried or burned. It is at this stage that the challenge of transportation becomes a problem. But what if we could redesign the world to get rid of the entire idea of waste? What if we could design products that can be immediately reused (not recycled) after they wear out or otherwise cease to perform their originally intended function?
Several thinkers have been proposing such a world. For instance, William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their book Cradle to Cradle (2002) that we can rid ourselves of waste if we establish and keep separate technical and biological cycles for our products. In this closed-loop scheme, old computer parts can be used in car dashboards, worn-out carpets made of biodegradable substances can be used as fertilizers, and wood desks can be turned into construction material. In such a world, we do not simply reduce our waste but transform our production systems so that nothing gets thrown away. As McDonough and Braungart put it, “waste equals food” (p. 92).
Thomson does not go this far. Her sights are high, but she is very much in this world, rather than imagining a necessary and emergent one that could transform our sink problem. To be sure, it would be a more socially just and environmentally sane world if those of us in the global North (especially in the United States) reduced our ecological footprint through the measures Thomson recommends. But in order to escape our current trajectory, we must more fundamentally revamp the system within which our consumption takes place. Rethinking the meaning of trash is one avenue for doing so.
In Automobile Politics, Matthew Paterson explores another avenue toward socioenvironmental change. Paterson dislikes cars. Like other fossil fuel vehicles, they emit not only carbon dioxide (a leading greenhouse gas) but also benzene, lead, carbon monoxide, and various volatile organic compounds. Cars not only consume dwindling oil reserves and significant amounts of steel, aluminum, iron, and rubber (in their production) but also require road building that often involves deforestation and landscape degradation. While troubling for him, these problems are the tip of a more structural iceberg. As the author elegantly outlines, cars emerged out of and reproduce the capitalist system and a modernist culture, and together these two regimes drive a broader arc of ecological and social destruction.
Paterson wants to transform such a political economy and culture in the interest of a more humane and ecologically sound world. Such transformation is no easy matter. Automobility runs deep. We like cars for their provision of speedy mobility, status, individual solitude (in the midst of traffic), technological convenience, and extraordinary autonomy. According to Paterson, these are not simply chosen values but deeply entrenched discourses that constitute our very identities as modern subjects. Our cars make us who we are: We love them precisely because they express our deepest self-understandings. One of Paterson's important contributions is to reveal the constructed quality of these discourses, and situate the specific sociological, political, and economic conditions out of which they emerged. By sliding a conceptual crowbar underneath our attraction to cars, he explains how certain forces naturalized automobility. This opens up the possibility of cultivating alternative understandings and practices for creating different identities and, in turn, a different world.
For Paterson, we can begin the task of transformation by remaking the world “without the car at its socio-technical heart” (p. 226). By developing a politics that exploits the contradictions inherent in our contemporary political economy and culture, we can cultivate alternative understandings and practices that work against these dominant logics. The author argues that we must recapture political life from its contemporary dromocratic character—wherein we are ruled by movement and acceleration—in order to disconnect mobility from the modern subject. By first conceptually deconstructing our predicament, and then adopting practices like bicycling and walking, we can crack open the regime of automobility and sow lived seeds of transformation.
Paterson's book makes eminent sense. We need a wholesale alteration of our political economy and culture if we are to avoid digging a more unsustainable trough toward our socioecological future. Moreover, only a politics that works both within and outside our systems of thought and practice can possibly be relevant for our present age. The only weakness of Automoble Politics is the language within which it is cast. The book is tough going in parts. So immersed in various literatures is the author that he cannot stop himself from embedding his ideas in disciplinary contexts and dueling with various interlocutors. Too often, he will deviate to a discussion about a specific author in the midst of developing an argument and split conceptual hairs. Even when the concept or author under discussion is familiar, such diversions are not always welcome. At times, they distract from Paterson's central argument, which is powerful and important.
Thomson's and Paterson's books provide useful entryways into meaningful environmental politics. Both focus on a specific topic—trash and cars, respectively—and both trace their studies to broader elements of environmental affairs. Furthermore, both offer critiques of contemporary practices and proffer alternative understandings and actions. Thomson presents a straightforward analysis of trash transport, while Paterson interrogates the meaning of cars and their contribution to our current regime of unsustainability. Let us hope that both books win wide readership, and that readers will be inspired to work that much harder toward transforming our world into a more humane and ecologically saner place in which to live.
