CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Waste: Harming the Poor and Destroying the Planet

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

At the end of Caroline Fraser’s disturbing discussion of three books on the waste crisis that is harming the poor and destroying the globe, she concludes, “Read them while you can, while you still have breath in your body, because they are chronicling the end of the world as we once knew it.”

Her review in the April 23rd issue of the New York Review of Books is the most disturbing article I’ve read in a long, long time.  Living in the postmodern West, we survive in what the Situationists once dubbed “the spectacle,” where everything is reduced to the fiction of the commodity exchange, the buying-and-selling of selfhood and otherness and everything in between. And waste is the end form of the commodity exchange, where self and other are reduced to what is discarded.

Fraser reviews three books which, together, paint a grim portrait of the harm civilization is imposing of the very poor who seek to find something of value in the endless waste that the “advanced” nations of world – and especially the U.S. of A. – dump in the ever-growing “out-houses” in parts of the U.S. and throughout the “under-developed” rest of the world.  The books are: Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown),   Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife by Colin McFarlane (Verso) and  Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of........

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