ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Environmentalism in Decay: Microbial Decomposition and the Politics of Recycling from Ecology to Resource Recovery, 1960s–70s

• In Event: Metabolic Frontiers: Transforming Matter and Energy in the 20th Century

English Abstract

As the mounting trash crisis in the wake of a throwaway culture helped animate the U.S. environmental movement in the 1960s–70s, scientific understandings of how microbes metabolized and decomposed materials shaped a range of approaches to waste management. Tracking the evolution of these strategies, this paper shows how microbial decomposition shifted from an ecological ideal of material recycling into a tool in resource recovery amid a shifting global landscape of U.S. power. Earlier pollution abatement efforts focused on returning manmade materials to the natural cycle through microbial degradation to make them disappear. Plastics—whose resistance to degradation deviated from this ecological ideal of material cyclicity—drew particularly sharp criticism from environmental activists such as Barry Commoner, who decried their “unnatural” qualities. Nevertheless, as the oil embargos exposed the deep reliance of the United States on foreign resources, microbial metabolism in waste management was imagined not only as a means of environmental protection but also as a mechanism for extracting energy and materials from waste in the service of resource security. Trash was no longer to be put out of sight but rather mined for treasure, as industrious microbes were dispatched to ferment waste into useful products. The ecologism embodied by an appeal to embrace natural decay thus became reabsorbed by a conservationist logic of resource efficiency, captured by the slogan “pollution + technology = resources.”

Author

• Boyd Ruamcharoen, Harvard University