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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.
“…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
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