Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Can you imagine a world where the concept of waste didn't even exist? Well, waste is in fact a much more recent idea than you might expect.

As Enetta Cannell's book, The Green Ages, explores.

In the medieval period, attitudes to sustainability were very different from today.

Lauren Good spoke to Annetta to discover what we can learn from our medieval ancestors when it

comes to recycling, from the prevalence of repairmen to how to make paper.

Your book The Green Ages medieval innovations in sustainability focuses on so many threads of

the topic of sustainability, but I want to talk

particularly today about the ideas you cover on recycling, consumption and waste. You open the

book with quite a big statement that we're running out of solutions because we're using modern

strategies to try and solve our challenges when we should instead be looking to the past.

Let's start this episode by delving into this a little bit.

For people who are thinking, oh, well, how can we take inspiration from a medieval society

that is very different to what we know today?

What would you say to them?

Well, I just think it's very good to broaden the horizon.

We are at risk of losing what is most precious to us, namely this wonderful planet.

So I would say looking to the Middle Ages or looking into pre-modern societies,

looking into non-European or non-Western societies is just a very, very important and actually essential

strategy to open our mind for new ideas and new possibilities for the future. It's nothing about

imitating the rest of the world or imitating what people did in the olden days. It's rather about

restarting our mindset. And the Austrian author Robert Musil, he talked about

...