Heather Rogers

I read this when it first came out, in 2006, and despite other reviewers' complaints of its dullness, I found it fascinating and extremely readable. And it angered me. One particular chapter I remember most clearly - one that I tend to cite during dinner parties, before I stop myself - is called "The Golden Age of Waste", and deals with the post-war consumer boom in America. Everyone had a kitchen full of shiny new appliances, so advertisers began to convince people they needed a second show more fridge for the garage, a second washer and dryer for the "related living" setup in their new sprawling ranches. When this tactic failed to move enough units, the idea of built-in obsolescence began to take hold.

Or take the neat trick that pop bottlers have pulled on the American public since the early 1970s: To maximize profits, they did away with multi-use, refillable bottles, and shifted the burden of bottle disposal onto the consumer, then admonished the consumer to "Keep America Beautiful(KAB)." The story of how this was effected, and the cynicism of the KAB campaign is enough to make any recycling-minded person weep.

Author Heather Rogers was born the year before this reviewer, and one suspects she, too, was a child of PBS's "Sesame Street" and "The Big Blue Marble," and was also encouraged to "Give a Hoot" by Woodsy the Owl. Her clear prose and meticulous research make this a book to be savored and revisited, and recommended to anyone with even a passing interested in understanding the history and problems of garbage in America. show less

Gone Tomorrow is a strident and conventional environmentalist screed against trash. In a kind of cosmological sense, the third law of thermodynamics is a harsh mistress, and every process produces some kind of waste as it runs down towards entropy. But 20th and 21st century American civilization is a particular kind of grotesquely wasteful, a life of single-user plastics which endure for millennia, electronics that obsolete themselves, bruised fruit, shoddy fast fashion, machines that are show more more expensive to fix than toss, and so on, all formed into a massive waste stream that gets picked up from bins behind our houses, and through a clever little social magic trick, seems to disappear.

Of course, this is just a trick. The garbage isn't really gone. Instead it's compressed and trucked off to be buried in a plastic lined pit in the ground, and we have to trust the corporations involved, like the massive Waste Management, and the thoroughly captured regulatory agencies like the EPA, that it won't be leaking toxic leachate into the ground in a few decades. Garbage is typically finally dumped in areas with large numbers of BIPOC residents, or these days sent off to the Global South. It's a real problem.

I think my issue with this book is that Rogers is gesturing at the idea that trash is just another logistics space plugged into our homes, but she's coming in with such a resolutely antagonistic attitude that she can't see how the system works, instead only seeing the corruption and the harms. This book has an extremely romantic attitude towards the pre-Progressive era system of 'gleaners' who'd rummage through the garbage stream to pull as much value out of it before the remains would get tossed in the nearest body of water, and modern equivalents in zero-waste communes.

There are some interesting historical facts in here about the rise of sanitation engineering as a profession, almost all of which appear to be pulled from Melosi's classic Garbage in the Cities, and while this book opens an interesting question to think about how the advantages of garbage have been privatized by manufacturers and shippers, while individuals and society bear the cost, it's hoary environmentalism hasn't held up. show less

I read this book immediately after finishing GarbageLand. Both authors are from New York City, both books came out in 2006. Two authers dealing with the same subject, starting in the same geographic area, could I possibly learn anything from a second book about garbage? Unequivocally: YES.

Rogers' work is vastly superior in her analysis of historic, political and economic information. After a start that was nearly a mirror of GarbageLand where she talked about how city trash was handled in show more the early days (mostly pigs roaming the streets), to early sanitation attempts, the evolution of landfills and other disposal methods. After the historic overview, Rogers moves into how garbage came to be such an enormous problem. Much of what we discard is still usable as it is, or could be put to use in a different fashion.

According to the author, our society had to be conditioned and encouraged to create waste. A marketing consultant from the mid-twentieth century named Victor Lebow is quoted, "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption..."
p. 114

Rogers points out that while recycling does offer real benefits, it also functions to divert public attention away from stronger reforms. The idea of recycling serves as a message that greater consumption is fine because the act of discarding can be environmentally responsible. Manufacturers also improve their own image by reinventing themselves as "caretakers of the planet" and unleashed what Rogers calls, "a new phase in corporate greenwashing."

Polluters, regardless of how touching their ad campaigns, will not willingly engage in any meaningful change in their production practices without regulation. Unfortunately, the current popular terror against government regulation of anything works to maintain the problem as it is. Rogers appeals to citizens of the U.S. to remember that governments must act in the public interest, and not simply an agent of business. show less

3.5 stars

In this book, the author assumes that global warming is happening. What she is looking at, here, is some of the things we have been trying to do to mitigate global warming, so our intentions are good, but those things are being “twisted” in some way or just really aren't useful in doing what we want them to do, after all.

The book is divided into three sections: Food, Shelter and Transportation. Organic food standards are so watered down and small farmers (who we really think of show more as being organic farmers) are not able to get the official certification due to hoops and cost. There are villages/areas in Germany where houses were built so that everything is meant to be green/sustainable. When it comes to transportation, she looks at biofuels (forests are being clearcut to make way for monocropping for biofuels), hybrid and electric vehicles, and carbon offsets.

Very interesting. Some is stuff I've heard about, some not. A bit disheartening, though, when we are trying to do right by our planet. She does, however, end with ways that everyone (governments, businesses, NGOs, farmers, people in general) can work together to make things happen to help. show less