October 2024 Book of the Month

[Gillian]

Our book of the month picked by Rydon! We will meet in early November to discuss. Happy reading, y'all!

[Rydon]

Forgot to post this on Goodreads in addition to our Slack channel…

Read the intro chapter and found it particularly compelling. To paraphrase some of the treasure among the trash:

"nobody really cares what happens to rubbish so nobody asks questions... rarely do we think about the people processing our trash... the more than 20 million people worldwide who make a living in the informal waste sector... more likely to be women, elderly and migrants... we dump our waste on the margin and on the marginalized"

[Rydon]

I finished “Chapter 5: Used” recently which highlights the hidden problems with second-hand clothing collection, the uprise of thrifting and how it masks as a first-world solution while creating massive third-world problems. Towards the end of the chapter the author writes:

“We give away our things to avoid them ending up in landfill and unwittingly they up on a worse dump site thousands of miles away. This is the consequence of our globalized waste system. It’s not a flaw but how the system is currently designed. It is not so much waste colonialism as just old-fashioned colonialism. The cooption of others’ land and livelihoods for our personal gain. We have just closed our eyes to it.“

This was truly a striking chapter as it reveals the hidden cost of what we do through genuine altruism. It shows that the waste problem is not uniquely American or simply first-world but rather a consequence of a thoroughly global issue.

[Gillian]

can't wait to get there! only on chapter two but hoping to put a dent in it this weekend

[Rydon]

Chapter 8 “Breakdown” feels like a continuation of our last book “The Soil Will Save Us” as it mentions the importance of biome in soil and the role played in carbon sequestration. It’s cool to see how these topics inevitably overlap across multiple books.