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Technology has long been an essential consideration in public discussions of the environment, with the focus overwhelmingly on creating new tools and techniques. In more recent years, however, activists, researchers, and policymakers have increasingly turned to mobilizing older technologies in their pursuit of sustainability. In fascinating case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of two such technologies-bicycling and waste recycling-tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.
Sommario
PART I: INTRODUCTION Introduction: How Old Technologies Became Sustainable: An Introduction
Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler PART II: CYCLING HISTORIES Chapter 1. Use and Cycling in West Africa
Hans Peter Hahn Chapter 2. The Politics of Bicycle Innovation: Comparing the American and Dutch Human-Powered Vehicle Movements, 1970s-present
Manuel Stoffers Chapter 3. Scarcity, Poverty, Exclusion: Negative Associations of Bicycle's Uses and Cultural History in France
Cathérine Bertho Lavenir Chapter 4. Who Pays, Who Benefits? Bicycle Taxes as Policy Tool of the Public Good, 1890-2012
Adri de la Bruhèze and Ruth Oldenziel Chapter 5. Monuments of Unsustainability: Planning, Path Dependence, and Cycling in Stockholm
Martin Emanuel PART III: INTERSECTIONS Chapter 6. Bicycling and Recycling in Japan: Divergent Trajectories
William Steele PART IV: RECYCLING HISTORIES Chapter 7. Premodern Sustainability? The Secondhand and Repair Trade in Urban Europe
Georg Stöger Chapter 8. Waste to Assets: How Household Waste Recycling Evolved in West Germany
Roman Köster Chapter 9. Ecological Modernization of Waste-Dependent Development? Hungary's 2010 Red Mud Disaster
Zsuzsa Gille Chapter 10. "
Der Kampf um den Abfallstrom." Conflict and Contestation in Re-Valuing E-Waste in Germany
Djahane Salehabidi PART IV: REFLECTIONS Chapter 11. Can History Offer Pathways to Sustainability?
Donald Worster Chapter 12. History, Sustainability, Choice
Robert Friedel Contributors
Select Bibliography
Index
Info autore
Ruth Oldenziel is Professor of American and European History at the Eindhoven University of Technology and visiting scholar at the LMU Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Her books include Consumers, Users, Rebels: The People Who Shaped Europe with Mikael Hård; Cold War Kitchen with Karin Zachmann; Gender and Technology with Nina Lerman and Arwen Mohun; and Making Technology Masculine.
Helmuth Trischler is Head of Research of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Professor of Modern History and the History of Technology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Co-Director (with Christof Mauch) of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. His most recent book is Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers with Martin Kohlrausch.
Riassunto
Technology has long been an essential consideration in public discussions of the environment, with the focus overwhelmingly on creating new tools and techniques. In more recent years, however, activists, researchers, and policymakers have increasingly turned to mobilizing older technologies in their pursuit of sustainability. In fascinating case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of two such technologies—bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.
Testo aggiuntivo
“…an informative and very readable volume that offers stimulating ideas for further research.” • Technikgeschichte
“The reviewer freely admits to have learned many interesting and fascinating facts about ‘Cycling and Recycling’ in very different country contexts. In addition, most of the contributions have been written in such a way as to be so comprehensible and jargon-free as to make them accessible also to readers beyond the narrow circle of specialists, which appears particularly important for an interdisciplinary field such as environmental history. In addition, the collection reveals, beyond the semantic bracket of the title, a thematic stringency that one can only wish for in the cases of many available syntheses bound together.” • H-Soz-Kult
“This book’s conceptual framework is truly innovative and makes a much-needed intervention in the vast literature on sustainability. Writing against the ‘techno-fix mentality’ that dominates so many contemporary environmental discourses, the editors persuasively argue for the need to resurrect ‘older technologies for a new purpose.’” • Edward D. Melillo, Amherst College
