Armiero, Marco. “Resistance Does Not Go to Waste.” In “Garbage, Discarded Governmentalities, and the Ecosystem—Tensions and Resistances,” ed. Sayan Dey, special issue, Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2–3 (2025): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1353/res.2025.a988437
Waste and resistance are deeply intertwined. This is what decades of study on environmental conflicts have shown. The environmental justice movement is a testament to this deep connection. Indeed, it was born when marginalized communities realized that they were being selected as ideal dumping grounds for all kinds of waste—and they began to resist. In the canonical timeline of the environmental justice movement, everything began in the 1980s with the opening of a toxic landfill in Warren County, a predominantly African American community in North Carolina. As is often remembered, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support the strike of local sanitation workers. Communities do not want to be transformed into socioecological dumps—so they resist. People do not want to be treated as waste—so they resist. (From the article)
© 2025 Marco Armiero. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
