Waste, Resources, and the Past: Rethinking Sustainability

Our Advisory Board Member Dr. Franziska Neumann has been working on the history of waste and urban life, and was recently interviewed on her research into early modern London. In this piece, she discusses the way that past societies approached waste, revealing it to be something more than rubbish, but instead a material formation mediated by systems of labour, value, and sociality.

Her work speaks closely to the broader aims of the BSSI by thinking about modern environmental problems in wider historical context. Rather than presenting the past as a model to be recovered, history shows us that there are no easy answers. Perhaps it offers us something better: the ability to approach present conversations with nuance and distance. As Dr. Neumann writes, history gives us the ability step outside of our contemporary thinking and remember that notions of consumption, reuse and disposal have always been complicated, uneven, and part of broader social worlds. It is with this kind of critical distance that we can begin to carefully, and more critically, consider how to think about sustainability.

To access the full piece, please follow the link below.