This multidisciplinary book analyses the contradictory coexistence of consumerism and environmentalism in contemporary Japan. It focuses on the dilemma that the diffusion of the concepts of ...sustainability and recycling has posed for everyday consumption practices, and on how these concepts have affected, and were affected by, the production and consumption of art. Special attention is paid to the changes in consumption practices and environmental consciousness among the Japanese public that have occurred since the 1990s and in the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.
Empire of Scrounge Ferrell, Jeff
2006, 2005, 2005-12-01, 20060101, Volume:
22
eBook
“Patrolling the neighborhoods of central Fort Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring dumpsters, scanning the streets and the gutters for items lost or discarded, I gathered the city's ...degraded bounty, then returned home to sort and catalogue the take.”
—From the Introduction
In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.
Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person's garbage often becomes another's bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today’s highly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before—and yet the urge to consume seems limitless.
In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people's discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
If capitalism is such an efficient system, why does 40 percent of all U.S. food production go to waste-while one in six people in the nation face hunger? This startling truth has stirred increasing ...interest and action of late, but none so radical as that of the freegans, who live on what capitalism throws away-including food culled from supermarket dumpsters.Freegans is a close look at the people in this movement, offering a broader perspective on ethical consumption and the changing nature of capitalism.
Freegans object to the overconsumption and environmental degradation on which they claim our economic order depends, and they register that dissent by opting out of it, recovering, redistributing, and consuming wasted goods, from dumpster-dived food to cast-off clothes and furniture. Through several years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with freegans in New York City, Alex Barnard has created a portrait of freegans that leads to questions about ethical consumption-like buying organic, fair trade, or vegan-and the search for effective forms of action in an era of political disillusionment.
Barnard's analysis of this pressing concern reveals how waste is integrally bound up with our food system. At the same time, by showing that markets do not seamlessly translate preferences expressed at the cash register into changes in production, Freegansexposes the limits of consumer activism.
The commodification of Islamic antiques intensified in the late Ottoman Empire, an age of domestic reform and increased European interference following the Tanzimat (reorganisation) of 1839. Mercedes ...Volait examines the social life of typical objects moving from Cairo and Damascus to Paris, London, and beyond, uncovers the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in the trade of architectural salvage and historic handicraft, and traces impacts on private interiors, through creative reuse and Revival design, in Egypt, Europe and America. By devoting attention to both local and global engagements with Middle Eastern tangible heritage, the present volume invites to look anew at Orientalism in art and interior design, the canon of Islamic architecture and the translocation of historic works of art. Readership: All interested in tangible heritage in Cairo and Damascus, visual Orientalism (including photography), Islamic art collecting, and anyone concerned with commodification and intercultural contact zones.
In India, you can still find thekabaadiwala,the rag-and-bone man. He wanders from house to house buying old newspapers, broken utensils, plastic bottles-anything for which he can get a little cash. ...This custom persists and recreates itself alongside the new economies and ecologies of consumer capitalism.Waste of a Nationoffers an anthropological and historical account of India's complex relationship with garbage. Countries around the world struggle to achieve sustainable futures. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey argue that in India the removal of waste and efforts to reuse it also lay waste to the lives of human beings. At the bottom of the pyramid, people who work with waste are injured and stigmatized as they deal with sewage, toxic chemicals, and rotting garbage. Terrifying events, such as atmospheric pollution and childhood stunting, that touch even the wealthy and powerful may lead to substantial changes in practices and attitudes toward sanitation. And innovative technology along with more effective local government may bring about limited improvements. But if a clean new India is to emerge as a model for other parts of the world, a "binding morality" that reaches beyond the current environmental crisis will be required. Empathy for marginalized underclasses-Dalits, poor Muslims, landless migrants-who live, almost invisibly, amid waste produced predominantly for the comfort of the better-off will be the critical element in India's relationship with waste. Solutions will arise at the intersection of the traditional and the cutting edge, policy and practice, science and spirituality.
The treatment of waste is highly relevant to human life and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. This volume contains a number of innovative and cutting-edge approaches to waste ...treatment, which hopefully will provide authors with new ideas for research in the area of waste treatment to contribute to the development of circular economy models.
This book invites archaeologists to approach the significant process of recycling within the archaeological record at two different levels: of artefacts and of landscape.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt called for the largest arms buildup in our nation's history. A shortage of steel, however, quickly slowed the program's momentum, and arms production ...fell dangerously behind schedule. The country needed scrap metal. Henry Doorly, publisher of theOmaha World-Herald, had the solution.Prairie Forgetells the story of the great Nebraska scrap drive of 1942-a campaign that swept the nation and yieldedfive million tonsof scrap metal, literally salvaging the war effort itself.
James J. Kimble chronicles Doorly's conception of a fierce competition pitting county against county, business against business, and, in schools across the state, class against class-inspiring Nebraskans to gather 67,000 tons of scrap metal in only three weeks. This astounding feat provided the template for a national drive. A tale of plowshares turned into arms,Prairie Forgegives the first full account of how home became home front for so many civilians.
For at least two decades, major cities in Turkey have been subjected to endless waves of urban development that has left scores of building demolitions in its wake. The construction waste produced is ...immense but its removal or abatement is completely ignored by the state. Who will deal with all this waste? Enter the reclaimers (çkmacs), an informal network of building salvagers, who have stepped in to create a new form of assemblage that fills this gap. Erdogan Onur Ceritoglu makes an in-depth ethnographic study of the under-the-radar livelihood of the reclaimers long-term. He also focuses on incremental architecture through the reuse of second-hand building elements.
This article investigates the efforts of the Environmental Public Interest Litigation Network (EPIL Network) to understand how Chinese environmental civil society proactively created a network to ...mobilize resources, forge collaborative actions, and build capacities and foster wisdom to catalyze changes in the environmental rule of law and in the area of municipal solid waste management. Using civil society network analysis, this article aims to identify and account for interactions between the EPIL Network and other stakeholders, including the government. Finally, the study highlights the contributions of the EPIL Network, which provides an option for resolving political conflicts in China regarding municipal waste management.
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