Abhishek Deka

Pellow, D. N. (2002). Garbage Wars The Struggle for Environmental Justice in

Chicago. US: MIT Press

The issue of waste is linked to so numerous a concern that the constellation of concepts,
say environmental racism, environmental justice (hereafter EJ), capitalism, governance
and bio-semiotics, if not sorted in our heads, looks no different from a heap of garbage.
As a side remark, garbage as a mere mess is something that is being increasingly
rethought in the social sciences with the application of chaos theory.

Pellows aim in his book is to offer a framework to understand the environmental justice
movement in the US (he takes up the case of Chicago), which diverts in some respects
from the earlier ways of looking at environmental racism in neat ways of coloured
people against whites. Here, he argues for a fourfold approach, by looking at the history
of waste generation and solution, the multiple stakeholders involved, social
stratification and forms of resistance. He agrees with the idea of treadmill of
production (pp. 61), just as much as Gidwani and Corwin (2017:52) agree with Fosters
metabolic rift, but there are significant ways in which the emphasis is put differently by
both the authors. Pellow looks at the condition of workers within the recycling unit,
arguing that they are a vulnerable lot even within the unit; it gets worse with the entry
of the profit-driven Waste Management Inc. But Gidwani and Corwin look at the
informal sector of waste management as conducive to the wellbeing of the workers
involved; they do not invoke racism even when they say that Mundka consists of
Muslims, Dalit and OBCs. Their problem is that corporate capitalism encroaches upon
this prospect, backed by legal governance in the form of SWM rules; EJ is not their
concern, whereas Pellow can see multiple stakeholders, even within the African
American community with conflicting interests. Pellow is much more sophisticated in
terms of asking what the fight of EJ movement is for (pp.161), because he recognizes the
dilemma of a worker in the form of both ecological concern and need for employment.
He agrees with Bryants concept of EJ where both cultural and biological diversity are
respected (pp. 8) and he notes that waste is everyones problem, because pollution
knows no boundaries (pp. 161).

Pellow may, therefore, have a nuanced way of offering a fresh perspective to the
metabolic rift approach, which concerns itself with only capitalism. Since he also
offers examples from Antiquity to modern period about waste management, he asks us
to reinterpret human history as the history of struggles for environmental justice (pp.
73), almost bearing an affinity to Marxs statement in the Communist Manifesto1. Thus,
he also broadens environmental racism at the same time, by including all people (such

1
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
as immigrants, women) that in history were not necessarily of a different race but bore
the brunt of waste disposal. He substitutes social stratification for racism.

Pellows remark on reinterpreting history makes one to rethink waste as such, about
what its existence means in human history and what it does. Reno (2014) has
interesting insights to provide in terms of why the given notion of waste as a hazard
occludes other ways of understanding it. Our relation to waste (such as how waste from
one era ends up in the museums of another period), how waste for one group becomes
resource for another, what waste constitutes (does it have the same composition in all
places of the earth, in all societies?) and how waste comes to be defined (as matter out
of place in Douglas formulation or as a sign of life such as for the Pueblos of Jemez) are
all issues for sociological investigation. Reno is doing more by taking a multi-species
angle and looking at the ways in which animals deal with the scat as trace (a
phenomenon studied under bio-semiotics), waste as a means of exchange between life
forms2. He argues that it has implications for how we understand waste management, as
in the case of landfills, that could alternately be seen as a culture (in the biological
sense) of microbes.

References

Gidwani, V et Corwin, J (2017) Governance of Waste. EPW. August 5, 2017. Vol. 52, No.
31. Pp. 44-54

Reno, J S. (2014). Toward a New Theory of Waste: From Matter out of Place to Signs of
Life. Theory, Culture & Society. Volume: 31 Issue: 6, page(s): 3-27

Zizek, S. Slavoj Zizek in Examined Life. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 Nov
2016. Web. 13 Nov 2017.

2
Zizek, in Examined Life, sees the science of ecology as ideological to the extent that it does not see
catastrophes as reproductive of life.