Cooper - Recycling Modernity - Waste and Environmental History - 2010

History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.
Recycling Modernity: Waste and Environmental History

Tim Cooper*
University of Exeter
Abstract
In this article, I discuss some of the questions that arise for environmental historians from recent
historical and theoretical studies of waste. This article is not an attempt to methodically review the
entire corpus of work on waste within the social sciences and humanities. Rather I seek to draw
attention to the ways in which waste constitutes an important problem for environmental history
in particular. The article is in four sections. The first two deal with conceptual approaches to
waste that are presently popular and draws an analytical distinction between waste and dirt, terms
that are often collapsed into one another but which, when kept distinct, can do more useful work.
The third and fourth sections discuss present historical treatments of waste, their capacities and
limitations, before I mark out possible ways in which historians can take seriously the analytical
distinctiveness of ‘waste’.
Introduction
As Mark Levene has recently noted, facing the catastrophic potential consequences of
global climate change has done strange things to our sense of time and history.1 How
should historians respond to the sudden (and distinctly unwelcome) proximity of yet
another ‘End of History’. In some ways, we are unfortunate that the prospective terminus
of human species time arrived so soon after the declaration that history itself had ceased
in the deserts of neoliberalism.2 Perhaps climate chaos is simply the twist in the tail of the
end of historical time? On the other hand the proximity of a climatalogical ‘End of His-
tory’ might be a signal that, after the long dominance of piecemeal revisionism, historians
need to return to questions of totality. Viewed from the perspective of a generation that
must find a means of traversing the many possible paths through the ‘End of History’ and
emerge capable of handing to our descendents the prospect of a meaningful human
future, we are rightly thrown back upon the resources of historical analysis. The question
‘How did it come to this?’ must be answered before we can meaningfully ask ‘What is to
be done?’ This is the pressing responsibility of contemporary environmental history in the
present moment.
It may seem incongruous to move from this totalising perspective to the more mun-
dane analysis of the social theory of waste that this article addresses, but these two themes
intimately inform one another. Only an environmental history informed by historical
materialism can ultimately supply us with meaningful responses to our present predica-
ment. The narrow scope of this article, then, is an attempt to illustrate the role that the
social theory of waste can play in environmental history.3 More than this, however, I
seek to elaborate an analytical distinction between the often conflated categories of ‘waste’
and ‘dirt’. Much, I believe, rests on the capacity of these terms to do different analytical
work, with very different implications for historical analysis. I shall argue that,
despite appearances to the contrary, waste has been relatively neglected in historical and
ª 2010 The Author

History Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
14780542, 2010, 9, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x by Readcube (Labtiva Inc.), Wiley Online Library on [30/04/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Waste and Environmental History 1115
theoretical study, and that it is by turning our attention towards waste as an ideological
category of capital that we can see in operation one of the means by which the constant
production and reproduction of nature, in order to valorise capital, has been produced
and legitimated.4 This historical materialist turn is, I would claim, an essential prerequisite
to making environmental history genuinely relevant to contemporary struggles for envi-
ronmental justice.
The Limits of Dirt

To begin I want to elaborate some of the conceptual distinctions that I believe exist
between ‘waste’ and ‘dirt’, and some of the limitations of the latter category in particular.
There is, of course, already a well-established tradition of critical engagement with dirt,
which emerged in the wake of Mary Douglas’ classic anthropological study Purity and
Danger.5 For anthropology in general and Douglas in particular, dirt has come to be seen
as ‘matter out of place’. It is implicated in social practices which serve to establish distinc-
tions of inside–outside, clean and unclean, as Douglas comments: ‘As we know it, dirt is
essentially disorder … Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative move-
ment, but a positive effort to organise the environment’.6 The binary between dirty and
clean is critical to establishing an idea of social order, and through practices of hygiene it
not only constitutes communities on the basis of who and what is excluded from them,
but also operates to order those communities internally. Dirt serves as a category of abjec-
tion produced by hierarchical social relations. In her analysis of ritual cleansing, the
movement between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ becomes a dynamic process of identification whose
ultimate end is the complete loss of dirt’s identity in the processes of decomposition. Dirt
ultimately always returns to the cycles of matter, becoming once more undifferentiated.
Douglas’ work has been immensely influential in both sociological and literary study,
as well as within anthropology. Its insistence upon dirt as a category produced in social
relations has had particular influence on the post-structural analyses of dirt. Dominique
Laporte’s History of Shit, for example, takes the role of dirt in ordering social life and
applies it to the particular workings of European civilisation. For Laporte, the effort to
colonise and control the social procedures of dirt identification becomes entirely associ-
ated with the emergence of the European state and the colonial project.7 The source of
legitimacy of the European state system was its claim to create a cleansed social vision in
which ‘civilisation’ lies. These procedures find their most ruthless and cruel apotheosis in
the totalitarian state, as incongruous human identities that cannot be reduced to purity,
such as ‘blackness’ conflict with the state’s claim to able to order. By bringing dirt into
European narratives of progress and improvement Laporte is seeking to emphasise the
prior presence of filth in the production of European civilisation. Laporte reduces all so-
called ‘civilising’ practices to acts of refuse disposal, demythologising and exposing Euro-
pean history in the process, representing it as a history of the sewer. ‘Surely’, Laporte
writes, ‘the State is the Sewer. Not just because it spews divine law from its ravenous
mouth, but because it reigns as the law of cleanliness above its sewers’.8
The forms of analysis pioneered by Douglas and Laporte have found a place in the his-
tory of the nineteenth-century urban environment, particularly amongst historians who
see the cleansing of the European city as a key moment in the emergence of urban liber-
alism. Challenging narratives of technological progress and urban improvement, Chris
Otter and Patrick Joyce in particular have represented the history of attempts to order
human relations with dirt as an essential part of the disciplining of the urban working
class and the making of liberal subjectivity.9 Others like Chris Hamlin and Michelle
ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

1116 Waste and Environmental History
Allen have emphasised the elements of class conflict and ideological contradiction which
emerged around the discourses of public hygiene in the Victorian era.10 Hamlin and
Marald have both demonstrated how nineteenth-century concern with the cycles of mat-
ter encouraged a politics of urban waste which suggested the urgency of recycling urban
wastes back to the countryside, with important consequences in terms of critiques of
and emendations to Chadwickian public cleansing theory.11
There are, however, important limitations with the analytical deployment of dirt and
hygiene. The first is temporal. Dirt and hygiene, as presented to us by these perspectives,
risk becoming universalised means of imposing social hierarchies. It is unclear what, in
terms of social process, divides the analysis of European bourgeois cleansing practices
(Laporte, Otter) from the world of Leviticus (Douglas).Second, as a social category dirt’s
ecological placement is surprisingly uncertain. As a product of social relations it becomes
indistinct and invisible once returned to the status of mere matter. Ultimately, dirt’s need
to remain uncomfortably close to the human body undermines its capacity to engage
with the wider questions of ecological transformation, unequal material flows or the social
metabolism. In other words there is a lack of ability to account for the structures of mate-
rial flows, and the ways in which they might change, within these forms of analysis.
Third, the marginalisation of social conflict which often occurs in the application of dirt
is troublesome. Otter in particular tends to represent the imposition of disciplinary tech-
nologies in a linear fashion, assuming that they successfully negate resistances as a dirty
urban working class falls compliantly into line with bourgeois hygiene. The city as a site
of conflict, especially conflict over access to environmental ‘goods’, is thus reduced to a
machine for the making of ‘clean’ subjects. Hamlin and Allen, both provide histories
which demonstrate that the cleansing of the urban environment was a contested process
at both the ideological and political levels, but the possibility of dirt becoming a one-
dimensional analysis of ‘discipline’ is a problem that it is as well to be aware of.
There are moments though when dirt as a category of analysis threatens to break down
under these limitations, and these often revolve around the problem of dirt as waste. In
Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life (2005), the contributors employ dirt along the lines of
Laporte to illustrate the essentially dirty character of Victorian modernity.12 Although,
the essays cover a diverse range of material, they remain for the most part concerned with
the body, sensory experience and dirt’s role in ordering the social imaginary. When waste
emerges as a theme it is either as ‘waste disposal’ or as a synonym for dirt. However, in
their introduction to the volume the editors suggestively outline a different possible uses
of waste. They remark that dirt is both the ‘unregenerate’ but, when thought of as waste,
becomes ‘conceivably productive’.13 This observation is not really followed through by
the contributions to the edition, but I would agree that waste ultimately pulls dirt out of
the realm of the abject and forces it into the realm of the circulation of value. The ulti-
mate end of dirt, does not have to be a disintegration into non-identity, but can instead
be a remaking as value. The implication of this is also that something not initially cate-
gorised as dirt can still be waste, decisively separating the operation of waste as a category
from that of dirt. It is at the moment of valorisation therefore that a properly historicised
understanding of the distinctive qualities of the category of waste becomes urgently nec-
essary.
The Meaning of Waste

The etymology of the word ‘waste’ can be traced to the mediaeval latin vastum or wastum,
which was applied from the twelfth century to describe land that had been devastated by

the consequences of war or disease and from which reduced tax revenues could
be expected.14 In Middle English the term came to signify the uncultivated lands sur-
rounding the cultivated spaces of the manorial estates, which were the property of the
manorial lord but also often the subject of common rights. These common wastes had
particular ecological uses for the commoners, providing access to fuel, building materials
and plants and animals which expanded the dietary possibilities of the commoners.15 This
early history of the meaning of waste is significant, as it is suggestive of the ways in
which meaning of waste has altered historically. The earliest meanings accorded to ‘waste’
in English were closely allied with the particular ‘social-ecology’ of pre-capitalist agricul-
tural production. ‘Waste’ in its earliest form was productive of a certain form of environ-
ment, and a certain form of hierarchically ordered society. This is a key point, for the
meaning of ‘waste’ subsequently showed a tendency to co-evolve alongside socio-ecolog-
ical transformations, and the contestation of those transformations. These transformations
of meaning eventually became bound up in the evolution of capitalist ideas of value and
nature. The ideological contest over the meaning of waste has played a historically crucial
part in enabling the production of a capitalistically organised nature. How ‘waste’ attained
its distinctively modern meaning as neglected value, or unrealised productive force, there-
fore becomes a critical question.
The essential starting point for any effort to address this problem is John Scanlan’s On
Garbage.16 Unlike the universalised dirt of the anthropologists, Scanlan sees waste as the
inescapable remainder of processes of modernisation. The Enlightenment, whose objec-
tive was the production of an improved knowledge progressively cleansed of error, is
constructed through and produced by the attempt to capture and improve waste. The
Enlightenment therefore produces a binary between ‘waste’ and ‘value’. Although this
binary structure is similar to that which exists between the dirty and the clean, it is his-
torically specific. For Scanlan, the very processes of Enlightenment progress become
themselves productive of waste. Odds and ends that cannot ultimately be incorporated
into the single homogenous rational picture of western knowledge and practice cause the
waste-value binary to collapse. Waste becomes a negation of Enlightenment. Scanlan
argues that we should therefore regard waste not simply as a binary or cyclical system like
‘dirt’ but as a ‘moral economy’ with a linear, entropic temporality:
Clearly, then, the meaning of ‘waste’ carries force because of the way in which it symbolises an
idea of improper use, and therefore operates within a more or less moral economy of the right,
the good, the proper, their opposites and all values in between. In other words, all talk about
waste – as we shall see – generally foregrounds a concern with ends, outcomes or consequences,
and the recognition of waste indicates a need for attention to what usually remains unknown.
Scanlan indicates the need for a historicised understanding of the ways in which this
moral economy of waste is historically produced, and hints at the politicised, contested
nature of this production. A glimpse of the history of this ‘moral economy’ of waste is
provided when he traces the modern meaning of waste from the scientific revolution of
the seventeenth century through to the emergence of the ‘waste-book’ in the accounting
methods of early political economy.17 Scanlan also points out the importance of Locke in
remaking waste as an metaphysical category in which the entire globe is rendered not
abundant, but waste, demanding active intervention either by divine or human hand to
order and valorise it.18
In a subsequent essay, Scanlan’s focus moves even more explicitly towards the historical
investigation of waste. Investigating temporality in the work of Henry Mayhew and May-
hew’s interest in the relations between poverty and waste, Scanlan demonstrates the

continuing presence of ‘the leftover and elusive, the filthy and waste, as well as the peo-
ple places and phenomena that seemed to have escaped the rational time of modernity’.19
Mayhew reveals the world of the ‘idle’ poor of the Victorian metropolis as at odds with
the temporality of bourgeois reason, establishing ‘an exclusion zone that became a kind
of dump for failures, defects and the dead’. Mayhew’s fascination with a wasted (rather
than dirty) humanity explores the temporal dimension of the devalued, revealing how the
bourgeois telos requires projects of exclusion and abjection. Simultaneously, the presence
of forces of decay and decadence, Scanlan’s ‘lasting-on’ of waste, threatens to negate
bourgeois promises of progress and improvement. The very temporality of waste thus
becomes a site of contradiction and conflict between competing moral economies and
temporalities of value.
‘Refuse Revolutions’ and ‘Waste Regimes’

Scanlan’s work directs our attention to a crucial point in the constitution of waste, the
point of disposal. Disposal is the point at which the category ‘waste’ becomes embodied
in the material practices associated with the production and valorisation of nature. Dis-
posal is the site of greatest political contestation over waste and its environmental impact,
and the point at which contradictions between waste as dirt and waste as neglected value
are most evident. These contradictions are the subject of urban environmental history
and industrial ecology, where waste is investigated as an effect of the absorption of nature
into capital.20 Raw materials are concentrated in the city as objects in the processes of
production and consumption waste becomes a point of contradiction within the capitalist
social metabolism. The capitalist process simultaneously vindicates and celebrates its domi-
nation and transformation of nature in the industrial metropolis only to see this triumph
turn to dust in its hands as the terrifying abject contents of our sewers and dust-bins.
The politics of waste becomes more and more prominent as the absorption of nature’s
products into the social metabolism intensifies. In the late-nineteenth century the chang-
ing politics of waste was partly reflected in a professionalisation of waste disposal that
radically transformed the way in which capitalist societies dealt with urban refuse, the
‘Refuse Revolution’ in Bill Luckin’s telling terminology.21 Waste disposal in Britain
underwent a significant transformation after the Public Health Act of 1875, and post-con-
sumption waste became a social and political question among urban reformers in ways
that it had not been before. But we should avoid establishing a teleology. The contradic-
tory nature of technological interventions in environmental problems has been attested in
the work of historians of technology like J. A. Tarr and M. Melosi.22 And as recent work
by John Clark has suggested the ‘Refuse Revolution’ remained a contested and incom-
plete phenomenon.23
Indeed, the production of disposability is perhaps as important a process for capital as
the production of waste. New disposal technologies in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, landfill and incineration for instance, were as much about producing disposability
and expanding the velocity of capital’s valorisation process as about solving the pragmatic
problem of what to do with garbage. Nowhere is this more evident than in Susan Strass-
er’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Investigating the ways in which the uses of
waste have changed since the early nineteenth century, Strasser locates a key point of
transition in the shift from a domestic culture of handicraft (with its focus on recycling,
craft and bricolage) to a culture of consumption founded on advertising, the supermarket
and disposability. For Strasser, the key to the transformation of America’s relationship
with waste is the changing nature of capitalism itself and the emergence of the consumer

society in particular. Strasser argues that older traditions of reuse were deliberately
destroyed through the intervention of capitalist propaganda and the cultural production
of disposability. The consequence was the substitution of long-established female domes-
tic skills and creativity by the consumption of disposable objects for the domestic sphere
produced by male-dominated technoscience.
One of the most ambitious attempts to delineate the historical production of waste
through disposal has been made by Zsuzsa Gille.24 Gille’s compelling study of the evolu-
tion of waste production, recycling and disposal through the various economic and politi-
cal transitions of twentieth-century Hungary is embedded in the historicity of the
practices of waste disposal. Gille’s major contribution to analysis of waste disposal is the
concept of the ‘waste regime’:
Waste regimes differ from each other according to the production, representation and politics
of waste. In studying the production of waste, we are asking questions such as what social
relations determine waste production and what is the material composition of wastes. When
we inquire into the representation of waste, we are asking which side of the key dichotomies
waste has been identified with, how and why waste’s materiality has been misunderstood, and
with what consequences. Also to be investigated here are the key bodies of knowledge and
expertise that are mobilised in dealing with wastes. In researching the politics of waste, we are
first of all asking whether or to what extent waste issues are a subject of public discourse, what
is a taboo, what are the tools of policy, who is mobilised to deal with waste issues, and what
non-waste goals do such political instruments serve. Finally no waste regime is static, thus we
must study them dynamically, as they unfold, as they develop unintended consequences and
crises.25
For Gille, the ‘waste regime’ is a social and political constellation which both demands
the production of certain kinds of waste by producing a certain kind of disposal. It seeks
to discipline producers and consumers alike to certain ways of making waste to reproduce
its modes of disposal. However, in contrast to post-structuralism’s somewhat linear, and
one-dimensional, readings of dirt, waste regimes are determined by multiple material and
non-material forces acting on one another producing different constellations at different
times and places. Waste regimes are contested, crisis-prone and evolve historically. Gille’s
concept of the waste regime deserves to be a crucial category for future environmental
historians.
Waste and the Narrative of Environmental History

In this final section, I wish to return to the question of analysing ‘waste’ from the per-
spective of the socio-ecological totality within which its meaning operates and is con-
tested. Recent interventions by John Foster and James Moore from historical materialist
perspectives have suggested a reconstitution of environmental history as a history of capi-
tal’s metabolic relations with nature. Their work has demonstrated the relationship
between the making of the world economic system and progressive phases of environ-
mental change.26 Ultimately, these phases of change, which are propelled by the logic of
capital’s value system, result in the construction of social ecologies that capitalism must
continually seek to revolutionise if it is to transcend the limits they impose. Their work
illustrates the operation of James O’Connor’s conception of the ‘second contradiction of
capital’ in which capital tends to undermine its own natural base. These interpretations
combine Marxist and world-systems theory in an analysis of the ‘metabolic rift’ as a sys-
tem of social reproduction which capital creates and is thereafter forced to try to sustain
or transcend. Within this system, I would argue that waste was a part of the ‘practical

consciousness’ of capital in which the constant transformation of nature is legitimated

ideologically. However, it also offers a point around which ecological contradiction
comes to focus, and the contradictory uses and occasional remaking of the meaning of
waste reflect this.
There are a number of points that I would make in justification of this attempt to
understand waste as an important component in the capital’s environmental ideology.
The first is that the social theory of waste has already indicated the prior necessity of
some foundational conception of nature which enables programmes of environmental
transformation. Although waste is presented by Scanlan as epiphenomenal, a residue of
enlightenment, it is apparent that waste is double-sided. Modernity produces waste, but
without waste on which to operate there is also no modernisation. The idea of ‘waste’
thus involves a dialectical symbolic process in which there is a simultaneous production of
that which must be disposed of. Waste is not to be seen, therefore as merely the material
product of industrial development, an expression of monstrous energetic excess.27 It was
also bound up with, and enabled, the imaginary elimination of all that was defined under
its aegis as either ‘useless’ matter, ‘inefficient’ practice or empty space. Anything, named
‘waste’ becomes potentially subject to practices of disposal, recuperation and revalorisa-
tion. This characteristic had vital consequences in terms of the capacity to imagine capi-
tal’s infinite penetration, and transformation, of nature. The legitimation of capitalist
ecological transformations required that the natural world should be seen as an over-
productive waste space that required reordering to redirect nature’s productive capabilities
to the construction of civilisation. As Carolyn Merchant demonstrated in the Death of
Nature, the redefinition of the common wastes in the seventeenth century as undisci-
plined and unproductive accompanied the reclamation of these spaces and their transfor-
mation into capitalist ecologies.28 David Blackbourn’s recent book The Conquest of Nature
similarly demonstrates how the efforts of eighteenth-century German engineers to
re-engineer and valorise German rivers were based on a prior conception of these natural
systems as waste.29
The attempt to reframe the common wastes as unproductive, an infringement of the
moral economy of capital was, of course, a site of intense class conflict. This was
evident in the argument between the utopian communism of Gerrard Winstanley and
emerging liberal understandings of property and the possessive individual. Winstanley
proposed that the English common wastes could be a basis for a democratic, communis-
tic form of ‘improvement’. This contrasted with the pursuit of improvement through
the extension of private property and a strong state on the model of a Hartlib or
Locke.30 Ultimately Winstanley’s vision of an England remade as a land of common
wastes was defeated, and enclosure prevailed, but English Radicals in particular contin-
ued to critique the improvers’ reconstitution of waste as immoral and requiring elimina-
tion. In his Rural Rides (1830), William Cobbett attacked what he saw as the
depopulating enclosures of the south of England declaring that ‘these enclosures and
buildings are a waste; they are means misapplied; they are proof of national decline
and not of prosperity’.31 Waste’s meaning remained a site of class contention into the
twentieth century, and the attempt to revalue unproductive spaces was at the heart of
modern landscape protection.32
The ideology of waste was globalised in a colonial language of waste. In the colonial
context, the idea of waste was applied to render these ecologies legible to the European
colonial gaze.33 Complex indigenous landholding systems were reduced to waste which
could be mapped, valued, taxed and improved. In India, for example, the colonial state
employed waste discursively as a means of managing the indigenous agro-ecological

system to extract a surplus. Waste was also present in the sense of unproductive lands
which irrigation engineers sought to dominate and render productive.34 Global ecological
transformation, following European capital’s model of development, was made thinkable
in the first instance by the imagination of much of the globe as a fecund, but waste,
space. European claims to scientific and technological progress required the ‘waste’ zones
of the world to be represented as spaces where free reign could be given to the forces of
rational historical development, authorising all manner of human interventions in the
environment from colonisation itself to the creation of private property regimes to the
transplantation of new plant and animal species.
These ecological transformations, however, created their own contradictions, which
forced reconstruction of waste to maintain its effectiveness as ideology. Such a reconfigu-
ration is apparent in the emergence of conservationism, for example. The classic text of
conservationism, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, reconstructed nature as scarce,
and humanity’s irrational exploitation of natural resources as wasteful.35 Subsequent stud-
ies of the progressive conservation movement, in particular, have demonstrated the rela-
tionship between waste, inefficiency and technological rationality in conservation
discourse. In conservationist thought and practice waste was reclaimed to signify a failure
of ‘civilisation’ rather than over exploitation. As Hays writes:
The conservationists ‘emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limita-
tions … Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political sys-
tem guided by the idea of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best
determine how to achieve it’.36
The conservationists’ understanding of waste as a failure of human control over the pro-
ductive cycles of nature legitimated a reproduction of nature as a product of human pro-
ductive interventions wholly given over to the production of raw materials to sustain
capital’s metabolic requirements.
Conclusion
As Paul Warde and Sverker Soerlin have recently observed in an extensive review of the
field, environmental history has struggled to find an identity and define a problematic.
They argue that a fuller engagement with political and social theory which already rec-
ognises that ‘Society’s nature is a political product’ should be part of the next phase
in the development of environmental history.37 Although I agree with much of this, I
wish to suggest that if environmental history is to respond meaningfully to the politically
constructed character of ‘social natures’ it needs to do more than adapt itself to social
theory. Current environmental history appears suspicious of the historical materialist
approaches that distinguished early work in the field, such as Merchant’s The Death of
Nature or Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire.38 The trend away from historical material-
ism in environmental history is partly reflective of currents of thought in the history of
science which have increasingly sought to investigate the particularities of the cultural
construction of ‘nature’.39 Ultimately, however, without a grounding in the material and
social transformation of ecologies, and without a totalising perspective on how this story
unfolds, environmental history will be able to add very little that is distinctive to this
picture. I would argue that our analytical categories and objects of knowledge need to
be of a kind that can render us knowledge of a global and systemic environmental trans-
formation. This should not exclude the social construction of nature, but attempt to
understand the relationship between ideology and material processes of the capitalistic

production and reproduction of nature. Waste, I would claim offers one fertile area of
investigation.
Finally, I should say a few words on the question of ‘What is to be done?’ If waste as
ideology has legitimated and structured the capitalist transformation of nature can it be
transcended? As I have indicated, one of the attractions of waste as a category is the fact
that it has been contested over time. Its meanings are far from fixed. Just as the reconfig-
uration of waste contributed to the appropriation of the commons it is possible that
reclaiming the value of the unproductive can have the opposite effect. Perhaps we need a
politics of waste that defends the value of idle time, wasted space and unvalorised nature.
The kind of society that can successfully survive and mitigate climate change may perhaps
be more tolerant of waste – and dirt too.
Short Biography
The author is lecturer in history at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus) where
he teaches environmental history and politics. He has published on the history and poli-
tics of waste in modern Britain. His most recent work has focused on waste as an ideolo-
gical category that enables capitalist claims to the right to appropriate and transform
nature. He is presently working on a project that looks at popular responses to the devel-
opment of landfill in early twentieth-century Britain.
Notes
* Correspondence: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Exeter, Tremough Campus, Penryn,
Cornwall TR10 9EZ, UK. Email: T.Cooper@ex.ac.uk.
This article was originally presented as part of the 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference. You can
read the earlier version of this article along with two commentaries from Zsuzsa Gille (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign) and John Scanlan (Manchester Metropolitan University) and extensive discussion at:
[q2]http://compassconference.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/conference-paper-recycling-modernity-towards-an-environ
mental-history-of waste.
1
M. Levene, ‘Historians for the Right to Work: We demand a Continuing Supply of History’, History Workshop
Journal, 67 ⁄ 1 (2009): 69–81.
2
F. Fukyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). For a compelling critique of Fukyama, see J. Derrida,
Spectres of Marx (1993).
3
R. Girling, Rubbish: Dirt on our Hands and the Crisis Ahead (London, 2005); H. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The
Hidden Life of Garbage (New York, 2005); T. Stuart, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (London, 2009).
4
N. Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1990 edn.), 49–90.
5
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger and Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966).
6
Ibid., 2.
7
D. Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, MA, 2000 edn.).
8
Ibid., 56.
9
C. Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late-Victorian City’, Social History, 27 ⁄ 1
(2002); P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City (2003), especially chap. 2.
10
C. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800–1845 (Cambridge, 1998); M.
Allen, Cleansing the City (2008); for a historical materialist account of the role played by the sewering of Paris in the
reproduction of natural relation and capital accumulation in the nineteenth century, see D. Harvey, Paris: Capital of
Modernity (2003), 251.
11
C. Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and
Disease’, Victorian Studies, 28 ⁄ 3 (1985): 381–411; E. Mårald, ‘Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and
recycling Theories in the Second half of the Nineteenth Century’, Environment and History, 8 ⁄ 1 (2002): 65–84.
12
W. A. Cohen and R. Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life (Minnesota, 2005).
13
Ibid., x.
14
A. E. Amt, ‘The Meaning of Waste in the Early Pipe Rolls of Henry II’, Economic History Review, 44 ⁄ 2 (1991):
240–8.

15
J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Common Land and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge,
1993).
16
J. Scanlan, On Garbage (Reaktion, 2005).
17
Ibid., 66–80.
18
Ibid., 24–5.
19
J. Scanlan, ‘In Deadly Time: The Lasting on of Waste in Mayhew’s London’, Time and Society, 16 ⁄ 189 (2007):
190.
20
C. M. Rosen, ‘Industrial Ecology and the Greening of Business History’, Business and Economic History, 27 ⁄ 1
(1997): 123–37.
21
B. Luckin, ‘Pollution in the City’, in Cambridge Urban History: Volume 3 (Cambridge, 2000), 207–28, 221.
22
J. A. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH, 1996); M. Melosi, The
Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in the American City from Colonial Times to the Present (Johns Hopkins, 2000).
23
J. F. M. Clark, ‘The Incineration of Refuse is Beautiful’: Torquay and the Introduction of Municipal Refuse
Destructors’, Urban History, 34 ⁄ 2 (2007): 255–77; T. Cooper, ‘Challenging the ‘‘Refuse Revolution’’: War, Waste
and the Rediscovery of Recycling’, Historical Research, 81 ⁄ 214 (2008): 710–32.
24
Z. Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist Hun-
gary (Indiana, 2007).
25
Gille, Ibid., 34.
26
J. B. Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); J. W. Moore, ‘Marx’s Ecology and the Environmental
History of World Capitalism’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 12 ⁄ 3 (2001): 134–9; The Modern World System as Ecol-
ogy, Theory and Society, 32 ⁄ 3 (2003): 307–77.
27
G. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
28
C. Merchant, The Death of Nature; Women Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1989 edn.).
29
D. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (Jonathan Cape,
2006).
30
J. Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle and the English Revolution (2000), chap. 9; T. Cooper ‘Modernity and
the Politics of Waste in Britain’, in P. Warde and S. Soerlin (eds.), Nature’s End: Reconsidering Environmental History
(2009), 247–72.
31
W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (London, 2001 edn.), 36.
32
Ritvo.
33
D. Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (2006).
34
D. Gilmartin, ‘Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 38 ⁄ 48 (2003): 5057–65; A. Bandopadhyay, ‘Towards and Understanding of the Environmental History of
India’, Calcutta Historical Journal, 16 ⁄ 2 (1992): 153–65.
35
G. P. Marsh, Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Washington, 2003 edn.).
36
S. P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (1999
edn.), 2–3.
37
S. Soerlin and P. Warde, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field
and its Purpose’, Environmental History, 12 ⁄ 1 (2007): 107–30.
38
D. Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water Aridity and the Growth of the American West (Oxford, 1985); C. Merchant,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1989 edn.); see also, M. Davis’ Late-Victorian Holo-
causts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001); G. Mitmann, ‘Where, Ecology, Nature
and Politics Meet: Reclaiming the Death of Nature’, Isis, 97 (2006): 496–504.
39
M. Carey, ‘Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future
Directs’, Environmental History, 14 ⁄ 2 (2009): 221–52; A. Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the
Making of Subjects (Duke, 2005).
Bibliography
Agrawal, A., Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).
Allen, M., Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008).
Amt, A. E., ‘The Meaning of Waste in the Early Pipe Rolls of Henry II’, Economic History Review, 44 ⁄ 2 (1991):
240–8.
Arnold, D., The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press, 2006).
Bandopadhyay, A., ‘Towards and Understanding of the Environmental History of India’, Calcutta Historical Journal,
16 ⁄ 2 (1992): 153–65.
Bataille, G., The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

Blackbourn, D., The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2006).
Carey, M., ‘Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Direc-
tions’, Environmental History, 14 ⁄ 2 (2009): 221–52.
Clark, J. F. M., ‘The Incineration of Refuse is Beautiful’: Torquay and the Introduction of Municipal Refuse De-
structors’, Urban History 34 ⁄ 2 (2007): 255–77.
Cobbett, W., Rural Rides (London: Penguin, 2001 edn.).
Cohen, W. A., and Johnson, R., Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005).
Cooper, T., ‘Challenging the ‘‘Refuse Revolution’’: War, Waste and the Rediscovery of Recycling’, Historical
Research, 81 ⁄ 214 (2008): 710–31.
Cooper, T., ‘Modernity and the Politics of Waste in Britain’, in P. Warde and S. Soerlin (eds.), Nature’s End:
Reconsidering Environmental History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 247–72.
Davis, M., Late-Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001).
Douglas, M., Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
Foster, J. B., Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000).
Gille, Z., From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Gilmartin, D., ‘Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 38 ⁄ 48 (2003): 5057–65.
Girling, R., Rubbish: Dirt on our Hands and the Crisis Ahead (London: Eden Project Books, 2005).
Hamlin, C., ‘Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of health and Disease’,
Victorian Studies, 28 ⁄ 3 (1985): 381–411.
Hamlin, C., Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998).
Harvey, D., Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Hays, S. P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999 edn.).
Holstun, J., Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle and the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000).
Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City (London: Verso, 2003).
Laporte, D., History of Shit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 edn.).
Levene, M., ‘Historians for the Right to Work: We demand a Continuing Supply of History’, History Workshop
Journal, 67 ⁄ 1 (2009): 69–81.
Luckin, B., ‘Pollution in the City’, in Cambridge Urban History: Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 207–28.
Mårald, E., ‘Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nine-
teenth Century’, Environment and History, 8 ⁄ 1 (2002): 65–84.
Marsh, G. P., Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Washington: University of
Washington Press, 2003 edn.).
Melosi, M., The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in the American City from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Merchant, C., The Death of Nature; Women Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper, 1989 edn.).
Mitmann, G., ‘Where, Ecology, Nature and Politics Meet: Reclaiming the Death of Nature’, Isis, 97 (2006): 496–
504.
Moore, J. W., ‘Marx’s Ecology and the Environmental History of World Capitalism’, Capitalism Nature Socialism,
12 ⁄ 3 (2001): 134–39.
Moore, J. W., ‘The Modern World System as Environmental History: Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism’, Theory
and Society, 32 ⁄ 3 (2003): 307–77.
Neeson, J. M., Commoners: Common Right, Common Land and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Otter, C., ‘Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late-Victorian City’, Social History, 27 ⁄ 1 (2002):
1–15.
Rogers, H., Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: The New Press, 2006).
Rosen, C. M., ‘Industrial Ecology and the Greening of Business History’, Business and Economic History, 27 ⁄ 1
(1997): 123–37.
Scanlan, J., On Garbage (London: Reaktion, 2005).
Scanlan, J., ‘In Deadly Time: The Lasting on of Waste in Mayhew’s London’, Time and Society, 16 ⁄ 189 (2007):
189–206.
Smith, N., Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990 edn.).
Soerlin, S., and Warde, P., ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field
and its Purpose’, Environmental History, 12 ⁄ 1 (2007): 107–30.

Stuart, T., Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (London: Penguin, 2009).
Tarr, J. A., Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Ohio: University of Akron Press,
1996).
Worster, D., Rivers of Empire: Water Aridity and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985).


Cooper - Recycling Modernity - Waste and Environmental History - 2010

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cooper - Recycling Modernity - Waste and Environmental History - 2010

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.

Recycling Modernity: Waste and Environmental History

ª 2010 The Author

The Limits of Dirt

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

The Meaning of Waste

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

‘Refuse Revolutions’ and ‘Waste Regimes’

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

Waste and the Narrative of Environmental History

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

consciousness’ of capital in which the constant transformation of nature is legitimated

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1114–1125, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00725.x

You might also like