Jay Nelson Writing

In his contribution to Examined Life (a documentary composed of several “street level” interviews with famous philosophers and academics) Slavoj Zizek perfectly describes that which Ted Steinberg calls “flush and forget mentality”:

“Part of our daily perception of reality is that this [heaps of trash] disappears from our world. When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it… Of course, rationally you know, it’s there in canalisation and so on, but at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world. But the problem is that trash doesn’t disappear.”

In her Cropped Out, Emily Brownell also addresses what trash means to the “lazy scholar”, writing that:

“Trash is an amazing topic for a lazy scholar; it is chock full of metaphorical potential. Encountering waste is a sensory experience that embodies multitudes of biological and cultural taboos, and thus holds a powerful ability to tell stories. But its power has always struck me as far more evident in the tight, thrifty geographies of cities, where the limits of space force confrontations with our own trash.”

Cities are, then, the geographic space in which trash must be confronted head-on. At their core, cities are trash. As Dolores Hayden points out, the other space in which most people live in the world today – the suburbs – continues to be defined by demographers against the city: as “the non-central city parts of metropolitan areas”. Given that, as Hayden says, suburbia is “the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies”, the opposite can be said about the city: it is the site of betrayal, nightmare, and (this conclusion should not be avoided) reality. It is this reality of the city, of trash, which can be seen in contrast to Zizek’s “daily perception of reality”. In other words, when the scholar confronts trash, they confront a reality which can potentially disrupt the flow of reality itself, breaking it up (like an earthquake disrupts everyday life in a way which cannot quite be fully prepared for).

In his Confluences of Nature and Culture, Lawrence Culver describes something like this disruptive reality in his use of the term “quantum leap” in relation to the place of William Cronon’s masterpiece Nature’s Metropolis in urban environmental history. The crucial point here is not to read this term in the standard teleological way of “a great improvement or important development in something” (from the Cambridge Dictionary), like Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind”. Instead, what ought to be noted is the minimal historical importance of quantum: in breaking up the Newtonian paradigm which previously framed everyday reality. In other words, that which Nature’s Metropolis means to urban environmental history is the point in which usual accounts of historical causality (one text influences another in an even flow of time) break down – that which such an account ignores is that Nature’s Metropolis is the core of urban environmental history which other works are unavoidably understood in relation to (like parts of Paris, for the tourist, are understood in terms of their proximity to the Eiffel Tower). Culver himself uses such a usual account of historical causality in the same section which overviews urban environmental history, which means that his brilliant use of “quantum leap” arguably escapes his own analysis.

What is it about Nature’s Metropolis that explains this dimension? In his preface, Cronon writes:

“At times, I use “nature” to refer to the nonhuman world, even though my deepest intellectual agenda in this book is to suggest that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic… I have tried to reduce the confusion (but may only have heightened it) by resorting to the Hegelian and Marxist terms “first nature” (original, prehuman nature) and “second nature” (the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature). This distinction has its uses, but too slips into ambiguity when we recognize that the nature we inhabit is never just first or second nature, but rather a complex mingling of the two.”

One thing this quote displays is Cronon’s tendency to argue that an apparently clean distinction between two things is actually a more grey “complex mingling” of the two, something which Brownell argues has a “long tradition” when it comes to the treatment of urban and rural spaces in environmental history. Cronon makes this point precisely in the final lines of the book, arguing that:

“One can understand neither Chicago nor the Great West [the vast rural space which lies west of Chicago] if one neglects to tell their stories together. What often seem separate narratives finally converge in a larger tale of people reshaping the land to match their collective vision of its destiny. In that vision – of a White City and its thriving countryside – the people of metropolis and hinterland stood far more united than not.”

Because of this, it would be easy (and arguably accurate) to claim that Cronon’s signature move is to demonstrate the unity of opposites. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that such a move is not displayed in every work of urban environmental history (for example, Hayden maintains the distinction between suburbia and the city, and many works focus on cities alone). It is another part of Cronon’s quote on first and second natures, then (perhaps an unexpected one) that I think best sums up the book as a whole: when he writes “I have tried to reduce the confusion (but may have only heightened it)”. While this line may come off as offhand and even an indulgent moment of self-deprecation, my argument is that it is anything but (or, at least, this is not the most interesting way of reading it). A link can be drawn here to one of Cronon’s favourite quotes, as stated on his website, from Francis Bacon (the painter): “the task of the artist is to deepen the mystery”. Do “heighten the confusion” and “deepen the mystery” not mean the same thing? (both posit something ultimately un-understandable). Because of this, it can be said that what sustains Nature’s Metropolis as the core of urban environmental history is not any kind of positive theoretical commitment, but rather a commitment to negativity (un-understandability) itself. For this reason, traces of Cronon’s work in works of urban environmental history cannot possibly draw from the whole thing, but only parts: fragments. In this sense, the place of Nature’s Metropolis in urban environmental history (at its most radical, Cronon’s book is urban environmental history) is much like a pile of trash: a Frankenstein’s monster of parts which do not really belong together, having an autonomous life of their own, but somehow originate from the same (commodity) form.

Such an autonomous life, or reality, can be seen in Martin Melosi’s Garbage in the Cities, published a full decade before Nature’s Metropolis (and pointed to in Culver’s overview as one of the first published which is often considered a part of what would later become (recognisable as) urban environmental history). The book is a history of the ways in which American cities have managed their trash, from what Steinberg calls “the great cleanup” onwards, drawing from a diverse range of sources including health and policy reports. A concept which the book introduces is “out of sight, out of mind”, which Melosi associates primarily with trash management in the late nineteenth century. He writes:

“Few individuals cared what became of the waste after it had been discarded. An out of sight, out of mind viewpoint, however, was inappropriate and impractical in an era transformed by urban growth and economic change. City life especially made individual disregard obsolete. As the mounds of solid waste piled up on every street corner and in every alley of the nation’s cities, urbanites were obliged to address the problem.”

It is clear in this quote how “out of sight, out of mind” is different from “flush and forget” – while, since it deals with liquid waste, to flush is to truly forget, to look to put something (importantly, in this case solid waste) “out of mind” is an active process: requiring the remembering of the thing in the process of decentring it (at least attempting to). Like Cronon’s book (this is a comparison rather than an argument that one influenced the other), Garbage in the Cities has its own dualism – between cleanliness and dirtiness. Where the two differ is that, for Melosi the conflict (of sorts) stays inside the city, where Cronon brings it to the hinterland.

Another text which keeps their conflict within the city (although, as is probably obvious, the boundaries are not so clear) is the chapter ‘Cheap Money’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. Published in 2017, the chapter draws upon the likes of economic theory and ecology to write towards nothing less than a history of capitalism. The authors argue that “what’s new about capitalism isn’t the pursuit of profit but rather the relations among the pursuit, its financing, and governments”. The authors tend to think in threes, with another example being:

“World money, world nature, and world power – these form the peculiar trinity of environment making that shaped capitalism from the conquest of the Americas to the unfolding disaster of global warming in the twenty-first century. In the modern world, money is an ecological relation. It has become, in the capitalist era, a relation that shapes the conditions of existence not only for humans – but for all of life. This is why it makes sense to say that Wall Street is a way of organizing nature.”

The final sentence is, in my view, another case of an insight escaping the author’s broader analysis (“reaching above” (or below) it). This statement, though, ought to be immediately qualified, as the lines between all three – in this case – are not clear: for example, the authors quote Fernand Braudel in saying that finance capital “only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state”. It is at these moments of working in twos that the city comes into view. If we are to say that a landmark is something which is more so the city than the city itself (which is why tourist ads for Paris show the Eiffel Tower, not some birds-eye view – the Eiffel tower is simply more striking as “being Paris”), then treating Wall Street as a landmark opens up an interesting dimension. While the Eiffel tower can be thought of as primarily having some sort of on-the-ground reality (as, for example, a reference point for tourists walking around the city), Wall Street’s reality is more so tied up in the purely formal interaction of addresses, figures, and that kind of thing. In putting finance and ecology in each other’s contexts, this is to say, Patel and Moore make possible an analysis of the “interaction between” this purely formal financial realm and the realm of on-the-ground reality (“real life”). The importance of urban environmental historians’ work to this becomes clear when one considers, say, subprime loans as trash – does this disappear? To make the bigger point, it is in this way that the properly international dimension of trash appears. What happens, for example, when the Senegalese government takes out a loan from Wall Street? In all, Patel and Moore’s chapter provides that which Zizek (and the rest of the Ljubljana school) call a “short circuit”, from the city to borderless trash.

While Cronon’s book is urban environmental history, it is crucial to point out that the same book nonetheless also functions as an “ordinary” work of urban environmental history, needing to rip bits from its own trash-like edifice to sustain its place in “our daily perception of reality”. Because of this, an analysis of it along the lines of Melosi’s book and Patel and Moore’s chapter is possible. Nature’s Metropolis was published in 1991, almost a decade after Cronon’s first major academic hit Changes in the Land (pointed out by Culver to almost not mention cities at all). The importance of the former can be seen as instant(ly recognisable), as – for example – Melosi demonstrated just a couple of years later. As can be seen in one of the previous quotes, the book is a history of Chicago and the Great West. A key move is the taking of commodity chains – the most prominent ones being grain, lumber and meat – to explore how Chicago was built. In the opening chapters, Cronon outlines the necessary moves that had to be made before the “official” building started – like a geological openness being interpreted as some kind of invitation for human development, and the building of railways and water management systems – reminiscent of Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” in the development of industrial society/capitalism. Much like Garbage in the Cities, the book draws upon reports from the time – particularly policy and business ones (related to commodity chains) – to make its points, as well as the intellectual movements of the time (the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner ends up being a pretty important framing device) and Marxist theory (as previously suggested with the quote which nods to Marx and Hegel above). Aside from the intellectual innovations already mentioned, an interesting contribution to urban environmental history Cronon’s book makes is its treatment of dreams. In the opening chapter, Cronon writes:

“If the boundary between city and country had no meaning here [before the building of Chicago, as we know it today], that did not imply that this was a world without borders. Far from it. The city’s history may have begun in the human dreams that prophesied its rise, but those dreams laid their foundations on solid earth, tracing their destiny onto the land’s own patterns.”

Here, Cronon makes it clear that the human dreams of Chicago were really the foundation of the city, but this foundation was itself a kind of interpretation of the land’s patterns which were themselves radically open. In other words, Cronon avoids the trap of “having to choose” between the chicken and the egg: that which put Chicago (and the Great West) on the path of coming to be, creating its destiny, was a kind of double-move – the radical openness of the land, and the (mis)interpretation (all interpretations here would be in some sense a misinterpretation, since the land meant nothing in-itself) of human actors.

Another text, this time from 2003, which addresses dreams is Dolores Hayden’s excellent Building Suburbia. While Hayden is most frequently considered an urban historian (among other things, such as a poet), the book is rightly considered a work of (urban) environmental history (one of the few which address suburbia). Drawing on the likes of lines from policy reports and by politicians, advertisements, architectural drawings and various sayings about dreams, Hayden’s book is a history of suburbia (since its inception not long after the city through what Culver calls “the largest migration in the nation’s [America’s] history”: the move of citizens to suburbia following World War II, still happening today). It can be read as a kind of application of Cronon’s double-move described above to suburbia: the mid-section of the book describes “patterns in the landscape”, while the closing section outlines its destiny (given, importantly, a certain subjective intervention on the part of humans). In his prologue to Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon writes:

“Chicago was destiny, progress, all that was carrying the nineteenth century toward its appointed future. If the city was unfamiliar, immoral, and terrifying, it was also a new life challenging its residents with dreams of worldly success, a landscape in which the human triumph over nature had declared anything to be possible.”

That which is striking is how this quote mirrors that which Hayden says about suburbia over a century later. To expand the quote used at the start of this essay, Hayden writes:

“Suburbia is the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and uplift.”

In other words, suburbia today is precisely what the city was over a century ago: the locus of the American dream (of “making it”, whether individually or collectively). That which is striking about the (dreams of) suburbia is precisely the lack of trash – “shoved” to the city (and the hinterland). For the dreamers, there is a wall – a border – separating suburbia from the two zones. Financial trash, moving freely through borders, was the site in which the city (the space in which we must confront our own trash) (first) penetrated suburbia. Because of this, it can be seen as no surprise that the 2008 Financial Crash began with the bursting of a primarily suburban housing bubble (by also suburban investors): it was precisely the dream of infinite growth, infinite upward mobility, which “burst” (while this is the case generally, there is still those that maintain the position of dreamers). I claim that it is no coincidence, then, that since 2008 we have seen the return of suburbia as a site of horror movies – of nightmares – with the more contingent contents (in this case being, as Zizek says, the “contingent expression of a deeper necessity”) of the likes of racism (Get Out), sexual violence (It Follows), and irresponsible governments cowering to the most destructive “instincts” of people (The Purge) haunting our post-crash world.

That which Garbage in the Cities, Cheap Money, Nature’s Metropolis, and Building Suburbia demonstrate (repeatedly) are some of the ways in which historians have taken something off the trash-heap and, by placing it in a new context, have transformed it into something new (even, I would go as far as to say, beautiful). In his Cannibalist Manifesto, the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade (this text can be seen as a model for all historically colonised nations) argues that it is only by identifying with the systematically excluded figure of the (native) cannibal – the site of nightmares in sixteenth century Europe (especially after Hans Staden’s sensational True History) – that the path to something truly Brazilian, and truly emancipatory, opens up. Describing his approach, Luis Fellipe Garcia writes:

“By turning Anthropophagy [cannibalism, basically] into the motto of a Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade operates an inversion by which he affirms as the leitmotiv of a cultural movement precisely that which operated as the principle of exclusion of a whole set of people from the domain of culture. The procedure of inversion, as noted the Brazilian philosopher Benedito Nunes, indicates that Anthropophagy is not simply a metaphor, but it functions equally as a diagnostic by which the trauma of the colonial violence is grasped and as a therapeutic which, by affirming as a positive value that which was systematically treated as inferior, renders possible the progressive confrontation with the problem.”

For Andrade, it is only by consuming (eating) the colonisers left-behind products – their diaries, paintings, ships, whatever (their trash) – introducing it to the foreign context of the native, that this emancipatory dimension emerges. Are urban environmental historians not like Andrade’s cannibal, but strange cannibals who only like to dine at one table (of Nature’s Metropolis)? That which makes Cronon’s text special, in my view, is not that we can (and should) always see it as a great leap forward, but that (perhaps) we can always return to it and see in it something new: because we have fresh eyes.