Changing Planet: Saumya Roy with Geeta Anand

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Estimates project that the world will produce 6 million tons of solid waste per day by 2025. The trash of Mumbai, India funnels to a literal trash mountain at the dump site of Deonar, where a tragic blaze wreaked havoc and clouded the sky with toxic smoke in 2016, impacting the lives of millions. Beyond the harms to our planet, there is a human story behind this mountainous terrain of hazardous waste and global overconsumption—a story of both tragedy and redemption, captured powerfully in the new debut book Castaway Mountain.

In a gripping, beautiful blend of creative prose and reporting, journalist Saumya Roy offers a stunning view of human life and connection that persists in the wake of the world’s waste. Castaway Mountain explores the lives of a handful of Mumbai’s 15,000 waste-pickers, who make a living plucking recyclables and usable materials from the excess trash. Through their experience, Roy presents a compelling portrait of our world—of a glittering and wondrous humanity worth saving from our collective waste.

Don’t miss Saumya Roy in conversation with Pulitzer-winning reporter and Dean of Berkeley’s Journalism program, Geeta Anand. RSVP today to share in a stunning conversation about our changing planet.

Praise for Castaway Mountain

“I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives,” Roy writes, “of the endless chase for our desires to fill us.” Readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers will be drawn to this harrowing portrait.—Publishers Weekly

Castaway Mountain deserves every accolade. A stunning achievement.—Kiran Desai, Booker Prize Winner, author of Inheritance of Loss

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