Reading Wednesday
May. 22nd, 2019 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhGod, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England by James Warren. Nonfiction about New England in the 1600s, specifically regarding interactions between Native Americans and the English. Warren does an excellent job of explaining in detail the Narragansett religion and government, and their complex trade and political alliances with other Indian nations (the Nipmucks, Mohegans, Montauks, Niantics, Pequots, Wampanoags, and others). I particularly liked his emphasis that, from the viewpoint of the early 1600s, it was not inevitable that the English would win control of the region. It's easy to look back now and assume things could only have gone the way they did go, but Warren reminds us that the Puritans weren't actually destined to defeat the Native Americans.
My main criticism is that Warren seems to struggle in finding a focus. Is this book a biography of Roger Williams? Not really, though he certainly gets more attention than any other individual person. Is it about King Philip's War (1675-8)? Also not really; though the war forms the climax of the book, two chapters out of eleven don't make for a "focus". Is it about the Narragansetts? I suspect Warren wanted that to be his focus, but without many written sources, he ends up spending way more time on the English than the Native Americans. Is it about the founding of Rhode Island? Eh, that's the closest any particular topic comes to summarizing the whole book, but there's far too much about the internal dynamics of the Puritan colonies (Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven) and the various nearby Native Americans to quite capture it. In the end, God, War, and Providence comes off as some neat facts without a clear beginning or end to give them structure and explain why these neat facts and not some other compilation of equally neat facts.
Despite that, it's an easily readable, gripping book, written for a general audience rather than an academic one. It's a great look at a time and place in American history that hasn't received enough attention.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. Nonfiction about what actually happens to your garbage (and recycling, compost, and everything you flush down the toilet) after it leaves your house. Royte follows her own household's garbage to tell a larger story about how the United States deals with trash, though it's pretty applicable to the western world in general. She takes a ride on her neighborhood's garbage trucks and hangs out with the "san men" (sanitation workers) who drive them; hikes and canoes over landfills; visits separate recycling plants for plastic, metal, paper, and glass, and one mega-recycling plant that claims to handle them all; tracks her poo to a water treatment plant; accompanies her food waste to a municipal composting center; participates in a Christmas tree recycling project; visits people who have actually achieved the no-waste lifestyle; and more. I have to admit, one of my reasons for reading this book is that Royte (and therefore her trash) lives in Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where I also live. Which doesn't that mean her facts and general idea aren't relevant wherever you might be, but there's an extra little personal joy I get from recognizing the specific streets and parks she describes.
As you probably already knew, trash is a major problem and we don't have any particularly good ways of dealing with it. Throwing things into landfills isn't a solution (they leak toxic chemicals and can continue doing so for thousands of years), but it turns out that recycling isn't all that great either (it costs more energy, isn't currently cost-efficient, produces its own waste, and often takes place in poor neighborhoods or countries, dumping the health costs of pollution on them). Also, it turns out that household waste is only 2% of the total waste the US produces. So even if you managed to entirely and efficiently clean up your own trash, you'd barely be touching the larger problem.
Royte wonderfully balances between these two extremes. On the one hand, most of us feel a much greater responsibility for our personal trash: it's what we can see and touch and believably do something about. Certainly Garbage Land made me want to really improve my own recycling habit. Most of the book deals with this kind of trash. But on the other hand, none of that matters compared to the mostly unseen specter of commercial and manufacturing waste, which Royte acknowledges. As she puts it, all the talk about recycling makes people "enthusiastic and active in largely meaningless solutions." She does make some suggestions for how to deal with such systemic issues, but of course they're equally systemic solutions and so don't have much for the average person to do, except perhaps lobby politicians. One such idea that really struck me was the suggestion that manufacturers should be made responsible for the cost of disposing of their goods. For example, a company that makes soda has to pay for either the cost of recycling or otherwise safely discarding the empty plastic bottles by paying a fine to the local government (similar to the idea of a carbon cap-and-trade) or they have to do it themselves, by providing places in stores where customers can drop off the empty bottles. This would obviously incentivize companies to use less plastic, or to replace it with materials that are either biodegradable or more easily recycled, or to reuse the bottles. This is one of those ideas that was absolutely alien to my worldview – it never in a million years would have occured to me on my own – and yet now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. I mean, why shouldn't disposal costs be considered part of the original cost of manufacture? I love it. I have no idea if it has any chance of coming into existence, but I love it.
Royte's writing is fun, relatable (from being grossed out by the process of weighing her garbage to sneaking under a fence because she really, really wants to get a personal look at a landfill), and full of interesting tidbits (just a few: the famous anti-litter "crying Indian" commercial was paid for plastic corporations who wanted to keep the responsibility for trash seen as an individual action; sanitation workers are three times more likely to be killed on the job than police officers; in the early 1800s, most houses didn't have trash cans, which themselves had to be advertised and explained to become part of daily life). The subject matter is somewhat depressing, in that we are absolutely destroying the planet and may not be able to fix it, and some of the specific numbers are a bit out of date (Garbage Land was published in 2005), but nonetheless I can't recommend this highly enough.
My main criticism is that Warren seems to struggle in finding a focus. Is this book a biography of Roger Williams? Not really, though he certainly gets more attention than any other individual person. Is it about King Philip's War (1675-8)? Also not really; though the war forms the climax of the book, two chapters out of eleven don't make for a "focus". Is it about the Narragansetts? I suspect Warren wanted that to be his focus, but without many written sources, he ends up spending way more time on the English than the Native Americans. Is it about the founding of Rhode Island? Eh, that's the closest any particular topic comes to summarizing the whole book, but there's far too much about the internal dynamics of the Puritan colonies (Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven) and the various nearby Native Americans to quite capture it. In the end, God, War, and Providence comes off as some neat facts without a clear beginning or end to give them structure and explain why these neat facts and not some other compilation of equally neat facts.
Despite that, it's an easily readable, gripping book, written for a general audience rather than an academic one. It's a great look at a time and place in American history that hasn't received enough attention.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. Nonfiction about what actually happens to your garbage (and recycling, compost, and everything you flush down the toilet) after it leaves your house. Royte follows her own household's garbage to tell a larger story about how the United States deals with trash, though it's pretty applicable to the western world in general. She takes a ride on her neighborhood's garbage trucks and hangs out with the "san men" (sanitation workers) who drive them; hikes and canoes over landfills; visits separate recycling plants for plastic, metal, paper, and glass, and one mega-recycling plant that claims to handle them all; tracks her poo to a water treatment plant; accompanies her food waste to a municipal composting center; participates in a Christmas tree recycling project; visits people who have actually achieved the no-waste lifestyle; and more. I have to admit, one of my reasons for reading this book is that Royte (and therefore her trash) lives in Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where I also live. Which doesn't that mean her facts and general idea aren't relevant wherever you might be, but there's an extra little personal joy I get from recognizing the specific streets and parks she describes.
As you probably already knew, trash is a major problem and we don't have any particularly good ways of dealing with it. Throwing things into landfills isn't a solution (they leak toxic chemicals and can continue doing so for thousands of years), but it turns out that recycling isn't all that great either (it costs more energy, isn't currently cost-efficient, produces its own waste, and often takes place in poor neighborhoods or countries, dumping the health costs of pollution on them). Also, it turns out that household waste is only 2% of the total waste the US produces. So even if you managed to entirely and efficiently clean up your own trash, you'd barely be touching the larger problem.
Royte wonderfully balances between these two extremes. On the one hand, most of us feel a much greater responsibility for our personal trash: it's what we can see and touch and believably do something about. Certainly Garbage Land made me want to really improve my own recycling habit. Most of the book deals with this kind of trash. But on the other hand, none of that matters compared to the mostly unseen specter of commercial and manufacturing waste, which Royte acknowledges. As she puts it, all the talk about recycling makes people "enthusiastic and active in largely meaningless solutions." She does make some suggestions for how to deal with such systemic issues, but of course they're equally systemic solutions and so don't have much for the average person to do, except perhaps lobby politicians. One such idea that really struck me was the suggestion that manufacturers should be made responsible for the cost of disposing of their goods. For example, a company that makes soda has to pay for either the cost of recycling or otherwise safely discarding the empty plastic bottles by paying a fine to the local government (similar to the idea of a carbon cap-and-trade) or they have to do it themselves, by providing places in stores where customers can drop off the empty bottles. This would obviously incentivize companies to use less plastic, or to replace it with materials that are either biodegradable or more easily recycled, or to reuse the bottles. This is one of those ideas that was absolutely alien to my worldview – it never in a million years would have occured to me on my own – and yet now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. I mean, why shouldn't disposal costs be considered part of the original cost of manufacture? I love it. I have no idea if it has any chance of coming into existence, but I love it.
Royte's writing is fun, relatable (from being grossed out by the process of weighing her garbage to sneaking under a fence because she really, really wants to get a personal look at a landfill), and full of interesting tidbits (just a few: the famous anti-litter "crying Indian" commercial was paid for plastic corporations who wanted to keep the responsibility for trash seen as an individual action; sanitation workers are three times more likely to be killed on the job than police officers; in the early 1800s, most houses didn't have trash cans, which themselves had to be advertised and explained to become part of daily life). The subject matter is somewhat depressing, in that we are absolutely destroying the planet and may not be able to fix it, and some of the specific numbers are a bit out of date (Garbage Land was published in 2005), but nonetheless I can't recommend this highly enough.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-23 10:38 am (UTC)Anyway thanks for reviewing, I feel like I need to read both of those.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-07 02:14 am (UTC)That is very useful to keep in mind, especially given the perniciousness of the destiny mythos.