Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Throwing Things Away

Our recent record-breaking snow accumulation is almost completely melted, and things are returning to normal around the Portland area, but one of the storm-related news stories that's still lingering is about garbage. Most residential streets in Portland don't get attention from city snow plows, and the snow and ice on those streets was just too much for garbage trucks. Some neighborhoods missed two consecutive garbage pick-ups. But this week, local residential garbage pick up has resumed, and reading about it in the Oregonian made me start to think about the character of trash. What is it, how do we manage it, where do we store it, and what can it tell us about our culture? So, read on for a short selection of rubbishy books that may help ask (and answer) a multitude of fascinating questions about garbage!

First, how did garbage come to be such an important element of modern life? Susan Strasser explores refuse in American culture in her eloquent history Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Strasser begins with an exploration of what came before or contemporary consumer culture – before about 1900, streets stank and people were ranker than we are now, but actual garbage, waste that's so useless no one cares to save it, was quite rare. Many thousands of people were employed in the business of picking through trash looking for useful and valuable objects. They were, in fact, recycling, though they didn't call it that. The spread of industrialization, rising standards of living, mass market advertising, and many other factors helped change that culture into the one we inhabit today. Waste and Want explores the path from an era of careful stewardship of items to one that emphasizes new, clean, disposable objects.

Next, what does garbage indicate about us and our culture? Archaeologists have long used midden heaps and trash pits to examine the details of people and cultures of long ago. In Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, authors William Rathje and Cullen Murphy document the work of the University of Arizona's Garbage Project. Scientists in this celebrated study comb through the trash generated by contemporary Tucson residents (and later by people in other cities), and then analyze the garbage to better understand people's consumption patterns. For example, during the spring of 1973, there was a nationwide shortage of beef. Garbage Project scientists collected data on beef in the trash from spring 1973 to spring 1974, and found to their surprise that beef waste during the shortage (excluding fat and bone) was 9 percent of all the beef bought in the area, while in the months after the shortage ended, waste was only 3 percent. Garbage Project staff finally hypothesised that the greater waste during the shortage might be due to the prevelance of "crisis buying" during shortages. People bought more beef than they strictly needed, and then weren't able to use it efficiently.  Fascinating!

Finally, doesn't our first-world disposable society create a lot of trash that isn't necessarily garbage? Ted Botha profiles dozens of people who collect things other people have thrown away in Mongo: Adventures in Trash – treasure hunters, compulsive collectors, dumpster divers, can collectors, and many other people who are fascinated by trash, earn their livelihood from it, or just find it irresistible.  Botha takes readers on a field trips with a collector who patiently scans closed landfills with a metal detector, a suburban woman who trolls Manhattan alleys and sidestreets for unexpected treasure, a specialist who focuses on finding discarded books, and many other dedicated trash pickers.

Stormy Weather

Our unusually cold and stormy weather is surely the biggest local news story today, yesterday, and maybe even tomorrow. Meteorologists are saying that this storm is notable because it is among the first to be accurately forecast by computer models.

Snow and ice or not, Portlanders talk about the weather a lot (actually I suspect people everywhere talk about the weather a lot!). But, would you expect to find a really interesting, readable book about the weather? Perhaps not. But I'd say the anticipation, drama, joy, and potential violence of our experience of weather is especially suited to building a stirring narrative – and lucky for you, dear readers, I have encountered several interesting, readable books about weather! Here are some of my favorites:

First, an amusing and educational little volume: Lewis & Clark's Northwest Journey: "Weather Disagreeable!" Meteorologist George R. Miller presents a series of weather-related quotes from the journals of members of the Corps of Discovery, and explains the science behind the weather they describe. Miller's commentary is engaging, but his straightforward discussion of the factors that create specific kinds of weather events in the Pacific Northwest is the highlight of the book. It's an interesting combination of topics!

For those of you who want to know even more about exactly why and how the weather works the way it does in the Pacific Northwest, George R. Miller's earlier book, Pacific Northwest Weather: But My Barometer Says Fair! should be just the ticket. Miller explains inversions, urban heat islands, factors that influence river and stream flooding, and many other details of our region's weather facts, figures and oddities.

Brian Fagan's The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization isn't really about weather, it's about climate – the larger pattern of weather trends over time. Fagan's premise is that when people were faced with the large-scale climate changes that took place at the close of the last ice age, they used their big human brains to make changes – inventing agriculture, irrigation, cities, etc. This made them more resilient to short-term weather variations (because, for example, they now had a surplus of food), but at the same time, they were more vulnerable to the catastrophic weather and climate events that occurred less frequently (because, to follow the same example, dramatic weather could destroy the complex innovations that had originally created the surplus.) The Long Summer is a fascinating history, and it provides some interesting insight into the possibilities for our future as well. Fagan's other books on climate are worth a read too: Floods, Famines, and Emperors, about El Niño; and The Little Ice Age, about the cold period in Europe between 1300 and 1850.

Things Unseen

One thing that photography does is to capture a moment and freeze it forever. But photography can't show the invisible. Or can it? I don't think of something as ephemeral as a cough as recordable, but according to an article in the New York Times, Dr. Gary Settles and Dr. Julian Tang of the University of Pennsylvania teamed up to photograph the disturbances in the air that result from a cough, among other phenomena. They use special techniques that probably don't involve magic, but do involve a curved mirror and a razor blade! The Times has a slideshow of several images including a gas leak and an AK-47 firing.

Another photographic pioneer who spent years perfecting his craft was W.A. Bentley. His fascination was not with capturing the invisible, but the truly singular: snowflakes. He spent years testing photographic materials and equipment. Lucky for him, he lived in Vermont and had a lot of opportunity to perfect his craft. A Caldecott Award winning children's biography about him by Jacqueline Briggs Martin was published a few years ago, Snowflake Bentley. The story of his life is supplemented by facts and beautiful, wood-cut-style illustrations by Mary Azarian.

I share the book Snowflake Bentley with many kids who have to do reports or read a biography for a genre assignment. One of my favorite things to do when I've sold them on the book is to say, "Do you know what else we have? Snow Crystals by Mr. Wilson A. Bentley himself, his actual published book of actual snowflake pictures. He set out to find out if any two snowflakes are alike, and he's pretty sure he did. What do you think?" They leave with the book, ready to explore.

Also capturing something indefinable through his lens, James Mollison photographs in close-up James and Other Apes. Who knew that a book of ape portraits could be so compelling? A quick glance through the book yields amazing portraits of incredible animals. Delving deeper into the introduction by Jane Goodall and the short (often sad) bios in the back reveals these to be portraits of unique personalities with names like Bonny, Jackson, and Fizi. On my subsequent visits with the apes, bonobos, and orangutans in this book, they became part of an extended family: their own, the Great Apes, and all of ours, as animals and humans together on this one planet.