October 15, 2025
“Steven Poole's non-fiction choice”
Steven Poole
Garbage. I hasten to add that this is not my critical judgment but the subject-matter of the book. Rogers's passionate argument is that garbage should not be thought of as a mere byproduct of comfortable western lives, to be forgotten once it leaves our bins. Instead, the apocalyptic scale of its production is deliberately engineered into the workings of modern capitalism. This point is backed up by careful histories of the industries devoted to packaging, advertising, recycling, and garbage disposal itself - by "landfill" (as though land were an empty hole) or incineration, the gruesome details of which Rogers recounts in some fine reportage of visits to such facilities.
What is to be done? You can follow the example of one Californian activist who encourages people to take refillable jars to Starbuck's instead of using their paper cups (of which Americans consume an amazing 125 million every day). This is a tiny step along the path to Rogers's proposed solution: instead of finding greener ways to dispose of garbage, we need to make sure there is less of it to begin with. One might start by reassessing what counts as garbage. After all, Rogers notes, "there are still cultures that have yet to formulate a word for garbage because it is incomprehensible that any object could be useless."