Is waste (or trash) really so useless that, as William Faulkner once wrote, [r]ead everything-trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. . . . If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window? (TE 2012) Interestingly, this critical view of waste (or trash) can be contrasted with an opposing observation by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once famously said that the waste basket is the writer's best friend. (TE 2012a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), waste, in relation to both uselessness and usefulness is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Of course, this challenge to the opposing views of waste does not imply that waste has no practical value, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to waste) like epidemiology, global warming, waste management, low-carbon economics, ethical consumerism, resource recovery, freeganism, environmental justice, space debris, and so on are unimportant. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of waste, especially in the dialectic context of uselessness and usefulness-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transfigurative theory of waste) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about waste in relation to uselessness and usefulness from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its post-human fate.
About the Author: Dr Peter Baofu is the author of 62 new theories in 54 books (as of July 2012) to provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge (i.e., the social sciences, the formal sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities), with the aim for a unified theory of everything - together with numerous visions of the mind, nature, society, and culture in future history. As a polymath, he is known for his pioneering works on post-capitalism, authoritarian liberal democracy, post-democracy, transfigurative waste, inquisitive culinary art, panoramic transportation, cyclical-progressive migration, multifold history, reflective criminology, transcendent architecture, interactive semantics, transdisciplinary performing arts, interventive-reshaping geography, complex data analysis, creational chemistry, comparative-impartial literature, supersession computing, detached gambling, multilateral acoustics, metamorphic humor, heterodox education, post-human mind games, post-Earth geology, substitutive religion, post-cosmology, contrarian personality, post-ethics, multifaceted war and peace, post-humanity, critical-dialectic formal science, combinational organization, hyper-sexual body, law reconstruction, comprehensive creative thinking, hyper-martial body, multilogical learning, contingent urban planning, selective geometry, contrastive advantages, ambivalent technology, the post-post-Cold-War era, post-civilization, transformative aesthetic experience, synthetic information architecture, contrastive mathematical logic, dialectic complexity, after-postmodernity, sophisticated methodological holism, post-human space-time, existential dialectics, unfolding unconsciousness, floating consciousness, hyper-spatial consciousness, and other visions. Dr Baofu earned an entry to the list of prominent and emerging writers in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007)-and was also interviewed on television and in newspapers about his original ideas. He was a US Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He has taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, North America, and Southeast Asia. He has finished more than 5 academic degrees, including a PhD from the world-renowned MIT, and was a summa cum laude graduate.