Carl A. Zimring

Carl Abraham Zimring is an American environmental historian.

Career

He currently serves as an associate professor and coordinator of the Sustainability Studies minor at the Pratt Institute.

Previously, he was an assistant professor at Roosevelt University, where he and Professors Michael A. Bryson and D. Bradford Hunt founded the Sustainability Studies program in 2010.^[1][2] Zimring’s research focuses on ways that human societies manage wastes, and how waste management practices shape environmental, technological, economic, and social systems. His book Cash for Your Trash is considered a sweeping account of industrial recycling long before residential recycling became popular, and a fine contribution to urban and environmental history.^[3] He has published more than twenty essays, reviews, and articles in scholarly journals and publications ranging from Environmental History to History News Network.

Zimring received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002, where he co-authored “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis: Achievement and Emulation” with his dissertation advisor Joel A. Tarr for Andrew Hurley’s volume Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis.^[4] He also holds a BA (1991) from the University of California at Santa Cruz and MA degrees from the University of Chicago (1993) and Carnegie Mellon University (1995). Before arriving at Roosevelt University, Zimring taught a variety of environmental history seminars at Oberlin College, and history surveys at Michigan Technological University and the University of Canterbury. He has been an United States Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) fellow^[5] and a Smithsonian Institution Libraries Special Collections Baird Society Scholar-in-Residence.^[6]

In 2010, Zimring received the American Society for Environmental History's Samuel Hays Research Fellowship for his forthcoming book project on waste, environmental racism, and whiteness in the United States.^[7]

Publications

Books

Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

The Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. General editor, with William Rathje as consulting editor. Sage Publications, 2012.

Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

“Creating the Sustainable City: Developing an Interdisciplinary Introduction to Urban Environmental Studies for a General Education Curriculum,” with Michael A. Bryson in Metropolitan Universities, forthcoming.

“‘Neon, Junk, and Ruined Landscape’: Competing Visions of America’s Roadsides and the Highway Beautification Act of 1965,” in Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller (eds.), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.

“Recycling Is Not Garbage: Market Agents and Municipal Recycling in New York City,” Progress in Industrial Ecology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 2006), pp. 329–343.

“Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades 1870-1930,” Environmental History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (January 2004), pp. 90–112.

“The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis: Achievement and Emulation,” with Joel A. Tarr in Andrew Hurley (ed.), Common Fields: The Environmental History of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1997, pp. 190–220.

References

External links

• Carl A. Zimring's Home Page.
• Blog.