The ends of consumption

An essay about Mumbai's garbage pickers, from Saumya Roy, author of the new book "Castaway Mountain"

“I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives -- of the endless chase for our desires to fill us,” the journalist Saumya Roy writes in her much-praised new book reporting on garbage sorters in Mumbai. In a moment of environmental reckoning and re-examination of the economic models underpinning our lives, “Castaway Mountain” arrives a…