Next American City » Magazine » Mira Engler Baltimore

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 312 pages, hardcover. $45.00

Not so long ago, men and women would follow the full-time harvesters of apples, grapes, potatoes, and cabbages, picking up the bruised, slightly wormy, but still decent food left in their wake. Now, giant threshing machines march up and down the fields like robot extras from a 1940s science-fiction movie. As agriculture and trash collection became large, profitable businesses, the scavengers, like the 19th-century ragpickers who once traded found scraps for cash, lost a job they never really held.

Our modern-day equivalents are the aluminum can foragers, who open bags left out on trash night and search for redeemables. Their fortunes rose as those of the field scavengers fell. Prior to the 1970s, when cities and states first put a price on tossing them, cans were just trash among more trash, going to landfills. Forty years earlier, cans hadn’t yet been invented, and a few years before that, in the early 20th century, garbage itself was virtually nonexistent in big American cities.

Mira Engler’s Designing America’s Waste Landscapes covers the whole dirty history of excrement, offal, leavings, and scraps as they eventually evolved into sewage, compost, recyclables, and toxic sludge. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes is not a social history of how households and municipalities came to produce tons and tons of this stuff daily, as was Susan Strasser’s better and more focused 1999 book, Waste and Want. Instead, it brings together in one place many far-flung conversations about trash in disciplines as varied as art history, architecture, engineering, anthropology, and political science, with scattered references to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. Central to the book is the idea of trash transparency—that we should look our waste straight in the gut, so to speak, and not shy away from the noxious smells, industrial apparatus, or toxic byproducts that are the results of being consumers. While Engler’s book is a valuable contribution to the growing field of garbage studies (in addition to several courses taught on the subject at various universities, there is an entire academic department dedicated to it at the University of Arizona), the author stumbles when she attempts to turn trash transparency into an unyielding ethical principle, one that seems to overlook real concerns and popular preferences.

Engler’s overarching concern is the application of this principle to the reclamation of polluted landscapes and the planning of future waste disposal sites. She devotes part of the book to the work of a group of artists and landscape architects—among them Mierle Landemann Ukeles and Engler herself—who have argued that, instead of recoiling from the waste we produce, we should integrate it into our everyday landscape. Many of the artistic projects Engler discusses have provoked policy makers and local bureaucrats to come up with more interesting solutions for our waste landscapes. Some works, such as Mel Chin’s experiment-as-conceptual-art piece Revival Field, have even advanced scientific understanding of what’s possible in remediating and recovering wasted landscapes. As a landscape architect who has submitted her own projects for re-envisioned dumps and former industrial sites, Engler is heavily invested in the idea that artists can make a measurable difference.

With this social betterment project in mind, Engler explains how New York City’s Riverbank State Park participates in the “esthetics of shame.” When it opened in 1986, the park brought to the working-class Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights a rubberized track, an ice-hockey rink, an Olympic-sized indoor pool with views of the Hudson River, basketball courts, and an outdoor diving pool. Riverbank is also affectionately called by some users, myself among them, Stinky Park because it sits on top of a sewage treatment plant. When the wind blows just so, you can catch the scent of effluvia drifting up over the landscaped track and community garden. Engler has diagnosed Riverbank as a self-hating sewage plant, however, because the architects have disguised its function too well. They went to great effort to give the site “quality architecture, public space, and recreational opportunities, but they did little to reveal the essence of the sewage plant.” In her view, the periodic whiff of the plant’s true nature only underscores the overall pretense.

The plant’s purpose, of course, is to clean up messes that most people never want to see again. It’s understandable that people might not want this function exposed, particularly when surrounding areas have been devalued by years of dumping or transferring trash—areas where a patch of pure, romanticized nature would look sublime. Engler criticizes Richard W. DeKorte Park, a swath of marsh and spartina grass reclaimed in New Jersey’s Meadowlands from industry and development, for having been rehabilitated to look too natural. “The design details, patterns, structures, and interpretative elements are confined to an internal and singular agenda, nature,” she writes. The “human dimension” is left out. But the fact is, the human dimension is overwhelming at DeKorte Park and the Meadowlands. Highway overpasses and the sound of trucks zooming by at 70 mph on Interstate 95 are pretty much inescapable at any point. Engler’s ideal of trash transparency emphasizes that nature and culture are interdependent and that remediated landscapes should incorporate a record of human effects. But the ideal doesn’t work terribly well in vulnerable landscapes, where the industrial economy is still belching up its effluents.

People living near proposed or existing waste transfer and recycling stations who object to their establishment or operation also come in for criticism. “Sometimes the same people who devotedly separate their recyclable [sic] and advocate recycling object to the siting of recycling plants in or close to their neighborhoods,” Engler writes. But it’s not just NIMBY yuppies who don’t want recycling plants—and their attendant trucks, noise, and fumes—near them: it’s everyone. In my working class Jersey City neighborhood, hundreds of residents wrote letters to the state Department of Environmental Protection objecting to the expansion of a recycling center across the street from housing projects and a half-mile from the most used park in the county. Engler mentions the history of environmental racism—which would include the original siting of the transfer station near the projects in a heavily minority city. But the politics of who dumps on whom is not just a subheading in a chapter about the ‘70s. It’s living history that drives very real concerns about living too close to trash-processing centers.

Engler is most enjoyable when she talks about truly stinky things: toilets and sewers. Then we learn about the intimate codependence of household yards and indoor plumbing. As the latter grew in accessibility, the former shrank in necessity. And as backyards lost their functionality, front yards grew thick with decorative grass, leading to a whole other new category of garbage for our times: the lawn clipping. The history of garbage in the past two centuries has been the history of urbanism: the rise of cities necessitated efficient collection of trash and excreta. Perhaps new graduates of garbage studies curricula will be able to pinpoint when the layer of lawn clippings arrived in the dumps and the exurbs started to dominate trash history.

Dirt Studio, “toxic beauty” consultants.

http://www.dirtstudio.com

Fresh Kills design competition

ww.nyc.gov

Garbage studies at the University of Arizona

http://www.bara.arizona.edu/gs.htm

Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I). Dir. Agnes Varda. Ciné Tamaris, 2000.

Hackensack Riverkeeper

http://www.hackensackriverkeeper.org

Susan Strasser. Waste and Want:

A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan, 1999.

Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory. Knopf, 1995.