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Modernity and the Politics of Waste in Britain

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Nature’s End

Abstract

Pollution rightly has a central place in environmental history. Urban environmental historians have focused a good deal of attention on industrial cities and the search for technological solutions to urban pollution problems.1 Recently, scholars have also displayed an interest in the role played by pollution in early environmental organisation.2 Ironically, one consequence of this focus on pollution has been that the significance of waste in the development of environmental concerns has been relatively underplayed. Waste and pollution were not simply two sides of the same, rather grubby, coin, although they were often closely associated. Waste can pollute, but the word itself carries a complex set of ethical meanings about the proper use of resources. As a category of thought ‘waste’ is a concept within which ideas about the right relationship between society and nature have been contested.

In addition to the ‘Uses of Environmental History’ conference in Cambridge 2006, versions of this chapter have been presented to conferences at St Andrews University, and the ESEH conference in 2007 at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. I would like to thank the participants at those meetings, whose comments have helped to improve the chapter considerably. Special thanks are also due those who have read and commented on the chapter in detail, Dr John Clark, Tineke D’Haeseleer, and, of course, the editors of the present volume. Part of the research for this chapter was completed at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews between 2004 and 2005. Information about the ‘Waste’ project can now be found online at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/envhist/ahrc.html

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  1. Tim Cooper
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Sverker Sörlin (Professor of Environmental History) (Professor of Environmental History)

  2. University of East Anglia, UK

    Paul Warde (Reader in Early Modern History) (Reader in Early Modern History)

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© 2009 Tim Cooper

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Cooper, T. (2009). Modernity and the Politics of Waste in Britain. In: Sörlin, S., Warde, P. (eds) Nature’s End. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245099_11

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