Message from the Board: April 2022

Robin Nagle (Roothbert ‘92), clinical professor of anthropology and environmental studies in New York University’s School of Liberal Studies, is also anthropologist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation.  To complete her ethnography, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, she spent considerable time on the job as a sanitation worker.  In Picking Up, Nagle illuminates the phenomenal processes required to remove 11 thousand tons of trash and 2 thousand tons of recyclables every day from the streets of New York. She also analyzes deeper questions about our waste practices–why those practices often go unnoticed, how we talk about what we discard, and what all of this might indicate about us as individuals and as a society.  This is one of the lessons she cites having learned on her first day as part of a crew: 

“Garbage has a stubborn ontological persistence that I had never fully appreciated until the first day I worked with a crew.  Garbage is always.  We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.” (Picking Up, page 49)

What is also striking about Nagle’s book are her explorations of the personal aspects of the department’s operations.  Although their service literally keeps us alive, we often ignore sanitation workers.  We simultaneously rely upon them for our health and well being while disparaging them and the work that they do.  Nagle has a clear and profound respect for the people in the department from whom she learned and with whom she worked.  It is impossible to read this book and not come away with genuine appreciation and admiration for the people who do this difficult, essential work every day.

In addition to reading Picking Up, you can learn more about Robin’s work by watching her TED talk and by visiting her website.  Nagle is a co-founder of Discard Studies, which is “an online hub for scholars, activists, environmentalists, students, artists, planners, and others who are asking questions about waste, not just as an ecological problem, but as a process, category, mentality, judgment, an infrastructural and economic challenge, and as a site for producing power as well as struggles against power structures.”

James Heinegg

Roothbert Fellow ‘99

Board Member