December 18, 2025
“Nonfiction Chronicle”
Tara McKelvey
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," Upton Sinclair said about "The Jungle." In her book, Rogers aims for the head, setting out to explain - with the help of Marx, Engels, and Barthes - how the United States became "the world's No. 1 producer of garbage." She poses a question - "How did we get into this mess?" - and then lays out a thesis: garbage is good for business but bad for the environment, and Americans should produce less.
Along the way, she covers fascinating, stinky terrain, mentioning a 1930's Rikers Island landfill where "rats became so numerous and so large" that the Sanitation Department "imported dogs in an effort to eliminate" them, and describing how, by 1939, "52 percent of cities surveyed nationwide were 'feeding garbage to swine'." She also traces the widespread use of the word "litterbug" to a 1950's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign, partly financed by the American Can Company, that shifted the responsibility for environmental degradation to the individual ("Packages don't litter, people do").
Rogers, a filmmaker who has written for Z Magazine, laments that so many people - sanitary engineers and others - have failed to challenge "the fundamentals of a market system that pathologically wasted resources." No one can say that about Rogers. She uses terms like "surplus value" and "concentration of the means of production" and seems to believe if people "saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions." Maybe. Or they might ask, simply, "How do I get out of this dump?"