The Outcasts

Level 4

"trash people"

in the societies of the wastefulness

Travel to the Philippines and meet

a Family who eat left over foods from the trash

Would you eat recycled landfill meat?

Room With A Loo: "I Live In A Toilet"

Inside Nigeria’s biggest scrap yard

Philippines: Deliverance

The Slum, Episode 1

Philippines: Risky Business

The Slum, Episode 2

Philippines Slums

The incredible technique of

thieving children at the ATM

Live in poverty

Zombies of Nairobi

Inferno Village: when leaving a land of fiery

coal pits is scarier than burning alive

Exporting harm:

the high-tech trashing of Asia

Huge fire burns Makoko Slum in Nigeria

Europe scrambling as China bans foreign

waste-plastic imports from 2018

China's growing recycling industry

The Yamuna, India's most polluted river

The innovative way India's handling

its massive trash problem

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Zygmunt Bauman: "Wasted lives. Modernity and its Outcasts", Polity Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2004.

The production of 'human waste' - or more precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernization.

It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the 'developed countries'. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek - in vain, it seems - local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda.

With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with 'human waste' provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.