Bill Rathje and I have a plan, a dream to create a center for garbology. Building on his twenty five years of sifting through garbage and digging land fill sites to show how wrong is our perception of discard and waste. Building on my obsession with matters archaeological.

Not just garbage and rubbish. Everything from the pleasure of ruins, through waste and excess, to the organic chemistry of decay, to public policy, to surrealism’s fascination with the materiality of everyday life, and more.

We thought the new Initiative for the Environment at Stanford would love this – the center will be all about our most intimate relationships with the environment. But no – they turned us down flat.

Maybe its all too grubby for them – the metanarratives at the heart of environmental ideology are, after all, about wholesome nature. We’ll see what projects they do decide to fund …