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In the mass media, in public debate and in the workplace, the fear is often voiced that garbage and waste may be the death of us and, even if they do not kill us in some apocalyptic eco-disaster, they seem to have pushed into crisis many of the political, legal and technological arrangements we depend upon to protect the orderly functioning of society. Although terms like "solid waste management," "landfill," and "recyclable" have become part of everyday speech, the crisis created by the mass production of garbage and waste have entered public consciousness virtually without histories, without contexts and without associations.
Public concerns about garbage and waste have multiplied in recent years. With expanding worldwide industrialization, waste production now appears unmanageable. The seemingly safe technologies of the past now pose unanticipated dangers. And an increasingly interconnected global society has forced an awareness that one person's dump site is always, in some sense, another person's back yard. It is in this atmosphere that this issue has been assembled.
Garbage and waste are potent subjects, overlaid with attitudes about pollution and dirt, disgust and revulsion. Yet at the same time, many of the problems associated with garbage and waste seem to be straightforwardly practical, technical ones, not especially amenable to the sort of conceptual, cultural or interpretive analysis offered by philosophers, historians or literary scholars. Because garbage and waste are inevitable products of human life and culture, because what we designate garbage and waste are defined by their role or place in our lives, an understanding of these dimensions must be an essential part of any attempted solution to the garbage problem. To understand the full meaning of garbage and waste we must understand their relation to the value-laden human orders which produce them.
Efforts to describe and define garbage and waste typically call on two venerable figures from western arts and letters: images of nature set in relation to a presumed opposite culture or society. These images can be seen in such topics as: What natural and artificial processes count as having "disposed" or waste: burning? burying? placing beyond a perimeter? What aspects or capacities of nature have made it seem capable of absorbing and transforming waste? How do depletion, utility and the history of an object's use contribute to its status as waste or garbage?
The moral and political stakes created by garbage and waste invite philosophical consideration in terms of distributive justice, freedom and the general will. Well-recognized dilemmas of collective action and democratic decision-making are posed in particularly stark form by garbage and waste because there are (perhaps inevitable) conflicts between the interests of particular individuals and groups and the collective interests of the society. Moreover, these societal and political issues are frequently complicated by ever-changing, yet ever-present, cultural distinctions between public and private life. It is these issues to which the current issue of Social Research is directed. Arien Mack
Marian R. Chertow, Director of the Industrial Environmental Management Program at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has worked on solid waste issues since 1978. Her most recent book is Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy (Yale, 1997).
Geoffrey Godbey is a professor of Leisure Studies at Penn State University. His most recent work is Leisure and Leisure Services in the 21st Century (Venture Publishing, 1997) and he has also co-authored, with John Robinson, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Time (Penn State, 1997).
Russell Hardin is professor and Chair of the Department of Politics at New York University. He is the author of One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton, 1995) and Morality Within the Limits of Reason (University of Chicago, 1988) and he is currently writing pieces on trust and street-level epistemology.
Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council's Urban program, specializes in issues related to solid waste management, recycling, medical wastes, and sludge. He currently serves on the National Academy of Science's National Research Council Committee on the Health Effects of Waste Incineration.
John Hollander, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, has published numerous volumes of poetry, anthologies, and essays. His most recent book is The Work of Poetry (Columbia, 1997) and he is currently working on The Poetry of Everyday Life (University of Michigan).
Reid Lifset is Associate Director of the Program on Solid Waste Policy at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Editor of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. His publications include "Take it Back: Extended Producer Responsibility as a Form of Incentive-based Environmental Policy" (Journal of Resource Management and Technology 21:4, 1993).
Benjamin Miller is an environmental planner who is completing a book on the history of waste management in New York City (W.W. Norton). As the former Director of Policy Planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation, he was primary author of the city's 1992 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan.
John Robinson is a professor of sociology and Director of the Americans' Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is currently co-authoring a new book with Geoffrey Godbey, titled Do Americans Know What They're Doing? Time Use and Our Loss of Understanding.
Michael Thompson is Director of The Musgrave Institute in London and a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway. He is a co-author of Culture Matters (Westview, 1997) and has also co-authored Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology and Social Choice (University of Pennsylvania, 1990).
