Editor's Note #3

Garbage and Gardens: For A New Romantic Movement

garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough

to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and

creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation

to trashlessness, that is too far off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic

(from A.R. Ammons, “Garbage”)

I’ve been thinking about garbage a lot lately. I nowadays walk from the Brooklyn-Queens border—in New York City—into Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through an industrial zone that includes the Metropolitan Ave Bridge, which sits atop the Newtown Creek. The Newtown Creek, a superfund site, is one of the most polluted waterways in the US.

This walk is an olfactory embarrassment of riches, at least if you’re a connoisseur of rot and refuse. Because I feel confined to this city—from which I desperately fled to Columbia County several years ago, only to drift back after the end of a pastoral romance turned sturm-und-drang in the third act—I push through truck exhaust and effluvia of trash heap, garbage barge, and the greenish-black toilet muck that is the creek itself.

A sign on one fence that lines the bridge warns—in English and Polish and other multifarious tongues—against fishing due to Newtown Creek’s “contamination.” There are three images–of fish, crab, and clams—on this sign, all pierced by diagonal lines, which accompany the message. A sketch of some mutant sea creature—an all-purpose icon for New Yorkers of every kind—might be more effective.

Garbage is indeed the “poem of our time,” in the words of A. R. Ammons, since it is the great problem of industrial civilization, isn’t it? Or so I’ve been thinking of late during my daily death march. New York City alone produces 12 million tons, or 44 million pounds, of waste in a day; much of this trash is non-biodegradable.

And how much of our organic excrement—from human shit to the carcasses of the animals we eat—is chock full of the forever chemicals and microplastics we hear so much about these days? (The latter found in the deepest part of the deepest hole at the bottom of the ocean: the Mariana Trench). Despite all our best recycling efforts, and they are mostly half-hearted, most of what we make, consume, and discard is non-recyclable.

Where does all this garbage go then, if it doesn’t degrade? Onto trucks and through trash transfer stations, then onto even bigger trucks and boats—operated by private waste-management companies like Covanta—and ultimately into big holes in the ground, scattered throughout New Jersey or points farther south, where some of this non-organic shit is incinerated. So it can poison air, water, soil in other forms.

Much of New York’s trash once went into Staten Island’s infamous Fresh Kills landfill—the largest on our ravished earth and a garbage dump so sublime in its proportions that it was scannable from outer space—but local complaints and cancer rates led to that monstrosity’s closure in 2001. (It has been covered and rehabilitated as a park and nature preserve over the subsequent decades.)

New York City, or its waste disposal policy, differs from other municipalities (in the US and great swathes of the overdeveloped world) in degree as opposed to kind. Our micro-plastic infused excrement is shipped elsewhere, often far from where it was made, for price, profit, and political expedience. But as industrial growth—and our disposable consumer mode of being (the American way of life? “advanced” capitalism?)—is the raison d’être of every society on the planet, where will our immortal refuse find its final resting place?

Is waste disposal what drives Elon Musk’s Martian fantasia? A dream of an extraterrestrial, and planetary, landfill as solution to the nightmare of drowning in our own toxic crap? Anything but a more sustainable eco-social metabolism.

One could say this is an entropy problem. From ordered, or usable, energy to the chaotic, random, and dispersed sort that can be identified with waste. But, according to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy marks closed systems. Is the Earth, or its biosphere, a closed system? Perhaps in terms of matter, but fundamentally not when we consider the sun.

Our bright star provides a constant supply of energy. Life on earth used this low entropy light and power as it developed into a self-sustaining, and negentropic, system—transforming the planet in the process—as scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulies recognized. Most know about ecological equilibrium, a macroscopic version of homeostasis, whereby all forms of life develop patterns that either keep entropic processes—waste—to a minimum or at least put them to work, as Ammons (again) exquisitely depicts in his account of spider spinning web:

if the web were perfectly pre-set,

the spider could

never find

a perfect place to set it in: and

if the web were

perfectly adaptable,

if freedom and possibility were without limit,

the web would

lose its special identity:

the row-strung garden web

keeps order at the center

where space is freest (intersecting that the freest

"medium" should

accept the firmest order)

and that

order

diminishes toward the

periphery

allowing at the points of contact

entropy equal to entropy.

(“Identity”).

Or, as pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold explains in a more scientific register:

Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the large carnivores.

The species of a layer are alike not in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat. A successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat both meat and vegetable.

Wastes of all kinds, for example, go back into the ecosystems that support the creatures that made the waste; it isn’t waste at all since much of it is used by other organisms as nutriment or energy.

Think manure, bacteria, and soil in this regard. When I lived among the farmlands of Columbia County—and these are mostly small, organic, and biodynamic farms—the chthonic smell of cowshit was, for me, if not exactly pleasant, often invigorating. (Why I prefer the barnyard funk terroir of biodynamic wine, which tastes like ass in all the best ways.)

As opposed to the Newtown Creek.

Land pyramids can be undermined or destroyed by sudden geo-climatic or even cosmic events—consider the asteroid event that killed the dinosaurs and cooled the surface temperature of the earth—or species that run amuck, from kudzu to…human beings? Or, let’s say, their sociotechnical systems—like industrial capitalism (and its state socialist doppelgängers).

Harmony is tentative and transient in the long run, like everything else that is. But these harmonies can last hundreds of millions of years. The Holocene would have endured a whole lot longer if we, or this order of things and its owners, hadn’t murdered it in the crib.

Although most, or at least most narrowly dogmatic self-identified Marxists, wouldn’t associate Karl Marx—usually associated with the Promethean transformation of nature into human use values—with an embrace of natural equilibria in the mold of Leopold, the old communist also offers us an ecological vision, an expansively romantic one even, when he writes in the third volume of Capital:

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.

He further elaborates on this idea of social metabolism and metabolic rift in his notebooks, as eco-socialist scholars John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito show in their work on Marx’s unpublished ecological writings.

Marx—who saw the non-human natural world as an extended body we share with the other creatures of the earth—tacitly presumed a more harmonious, pre-modern, eco-social metabolism, disastrously interrupted by the rising capitalism of his nineteenth century. (Despite his generally progressive view of history and disdain for the feudal past—an instance of his dialectical mind in action?)

This green Marx recalls the romantics he admired, German and English, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, in “The Sensitive Plant,” a long poem of 1820, describes the life of a fragile plant in a luxuriant garden: its flourishing under the care of an idealized lady, then its destruction alongside the demise of the garden after the lady’s passing. The lady gardener is a figure for wise and gentle stewardship or, in an eco-Marxian language, a more sustainable and harmonious set of eco-social relations that end with her death, which is also most certainly a rift:

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,

Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,

Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,

Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap

To make men tremble who never weep.

Marx was specifically concerned with the problem of soil exhaustion, which he linked to the capitalist separation of town and country. The shit, which once returned to earth for earth’s rejuvenation, was instead putrefying in city sewer systems while befouling creeks and rivers.

The depletion of the soil functions as metonym for a wide-scale break in the life cycle or ecosocial metabolism that (arguably) begins with the Industrial Revolution. There was, in fact, a soil fertility problem in the nineteenth century, which led to an inter-imperial struggle over guano (birdshit): an excellent fertilizer, apparently.

This problem was “solved” by Fritz Haber’s artificial nitrogen fixing process—making ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen—which was key to the invention of artificial fertilizer and the poison gas used to fight the First World War. We can see in these industrial fixes a much more perniciously ecocidal version of Marx’s metabolic rift, as they thoroughly alienate us from Gaia’s great negentropic life cycles while producing the kind of wastes that make wastelands of the biosphere.

At a certain level of analytic generality—physics rather than biology or ecology, say—everything is “nature” insofar as everything that is is part of the physical universe. Here is a banal truism too often cynically deployed in our moment: to blur the distinction between natural things or beings and artifacts, so this industry apologist and that radical constructionist can claim nuclear power plants and strip malls are “natural,” too.

These sophistical apologetics aside, much of our high tech skubalonocracy is nature out of place, disfigured, or recombined in monstrous ways. Mining the sunlight trapped in long dead and buried organic things as coal and petrol. Exhuming Hades and its fires, turning Gaia or Ocean into sink, or graveyard, for these “liberated” forces of production even as we sever earth from water, waste from regeneration—to speak in a mythical register.

Although the more apt myth in this case is Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, or Frankenstein, written at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or “Fossil Capital.” Victor Frankenstein notably robs graves, disinters then dis- and re-assembles the rotting bodies of the dead, to build a new and catastrophic form of life: the creature who is also, among many things, one of the first great figures for industrial modernity’s toxic waste—the forever chemical that never goes away?

Garbage is both a very real environmental problem and a powerful metaphor that reveals just how much our advanced capitalist civilization, with its loud and proud dedication to quantitative growth, is in fact dedicated to the ceaseless production of trash. Trash in this way, to revise Ammons, is exactly a product of “our illusionary ways,” while the dream of “trashlessness”—or at least compost, salvage, and a steady state—is a necessary end.

Ours is a garbage-making machine and the degrowth movement might better describe itself as a sanitation operation with romantic characteristics.

Finally: While I believe that Marx and the eco-Marxism I’ve described here represent a valuable analytic lens for thinking capitalism and the ecological catastrophe, I don’t see much from these quarters in the way of viable political solutions or even useful experiments.

One of the most successful—and harmonious—stabs at healing the “metabolic rift” now is biodynamic farming, rooted in Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy, which, according to most Marxists, is obscurantist and reactionary nonsense. Yet—drawing on my own research and some contact with various people at Hawthorne Valley, a Waldorf School and biodynamic farm in Ghent, NY—this is a real, working, “utopia.” And one that overlaps with various food sovereignty movements in the global south, driven as they are by different concerns and agendas, such as Via Campesina.

How to fuse these various, seemingly antagonistic, things into a unified sea wall erected against our radioactive shit tsunami? Even as Marx and Steiner in this case draw on antithetical elements of the same romantic movement, perhaps one way to reclaim the wasteland for garden and wilderness is beneath the banner of a New Romanticism.

Such strange combinations, or a new intellectual—and political—eclecticism, is what’s needed now. I once associated eclecticism with the politically toothless theoretical buffet of the academic humanities during my grad school years: anything to avoid questions of class or material inequity. Which is why, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, I embraced the mix of Trotskyism and democratic socialism that characterized the Jacobin magazine set. This was a necessary corrective that hardened into an orthodoxy whose advocates too often sought to reconstruct all of the worst aspects of twentieth century state socialism—from Promethean techno-Utopianism to the fetish for centralization as an end in itself—while dismissing the value of other intellectual traditions in toto.

Ecological awakening finally turned me away from this segment of the 2010s left, and now here I am: A localist-friendly eco-socialist open to various cultural and religious traditions, mainstream and esoteric. The historical romantics—like Blake or Hölderlin—combined Jacobin political commitments, a critique of instrumental rationality or mechanical materialism, and heterodox religious beliefs which stressed the primacy of imagination and Eros.

Why traditions as disparate as socialism, anarchism, ecology, and even anthroposophy all (arguably) emerge from the first Romantic phenomenon. In our moment of unraveling and realignment, neo-romanticism–and Romanticon–will, I pray, open a space where localists and lovers, socialists and greens, or poets, militants, and dreamers of all kinds can converse and debate, forging new movements and making new forms of life in the process.