A Greenhouse Research Talk by Stephanie Foote, Professor of English, University of Vermont and Distinguished Fulbright Professor at Uppsala University.
A hoarded house, with the hoard spilling out onto the lawn. By Downtowngal, via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
Why is the United States, which produces a disproportionate amount of the world’s garbage, so fascinated with stories of hoarding and decluttering? This paper asks how contemporary American cultural texts articulate a peculiarly insular, individualistic environmentalism as a way of managing the fact that American overconsumption is drowning the world’s ecosystems in garbage.
Stephanie Foote (she/her) is a professor of English at the University of Vermont. She has written several books and dozens of articles, and most recently co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities and co-founded and co-edited the open access journal Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture. She is currently completing a book about the intersection of narrative and material infrastructures of garbage and waste in the US.