Plastic Ocean

"Henderson Island, which sits in the South Pacific, made headlines in May 2017 after researchers published estimates of how much plastic had collected there. What they found was mind-boggling — something like 38 million pieces on an island that measures 5 by 10 kilometres, is presently uninhabited by humans, a World Heritage site, meaning that it is protected, and thousands of miles from major land masses or urban areas. The island, however, sits in the middle of a fluctuating field of ‘plastic ’ the movements of which are governed by the circular currents of the South Pacific Gyre. This is a similar plastics-laced system as the North Pacific Gyre, sometimes dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the one through which Plastic Ocean author Captain Charles Moore sailed through in 1997. En route from Hawaii to California, Moore’s boat had drifted through, to his distress, nearly ‘seven days and a thousand miles of plastic debris.’ Your question prompted me to pull up map of Henderson Island. I was shocked to see how far away Henderson is from the areas of the Pacific Moore describe. A recent study of the total global production of plastics —the first of its kind — also delivered some shocking numbers. Since 1950 the estimated total amount of plastics that have been made is around 9.1 billion tons. This is equal the mass of a billion elephants — or enough to cover the whole of Argentina in ankle-deep. This is an underestimation, since synthetic plastics production was well underway before 1950, accelerating and expanding in the years following WWII. But here’s the kicker: most of the plastic ever made has been produced within the most recent decades, and the rate of plastics production appears to be accelerating, especially in the category of food packaging and single-use (that is, disposable) plastics. No less stunningly, another recent study has shown that billions of people globally are drinking water contaminated by plastic particles. Moore wasn’t the first to note plastics this far out in the ocean, but after returning to shore he became one of the key figures inspiring research and raising public awareness about marine plastics. He couldn’t put to rest what he had witnessed. He took up researching the issues himself, recruiting allies and scientists to the work. On multiple occasions, he returned to the Pacific to trawl for microplastics —for example, the small bits of pre- and post-production plastics that are less than 5 millimetres across. After quantifying the spread and load of marine plastics, Moore went on to help document their implications and their toxicity. Plastic Ocean , co-authored with Cassandra Phillips, documents these pursuits. When plastics are made, certain properties are designed into the material through the addition of chemical additives that impart colour, flexibility, resilience, fire resistance, and more. Plastics transfer these additives into the environment, and, in turn, they can collect and transport other classes of marine pollution, including the PCBs and other POPs we discussed earlier. As Moore describes it, this leads to the ultimate paradox of our modern situation. Researchers now collect pollution to study pollution—they harvest marine plastics as a way to study levels of legacy POPs. There’s another piece to his story that resonated with me. His accidental encounter with marine plastics forced Moore to reckon with questions of inheritance and legacy. As he explains in Plastic Ocean , his father was an industrial chemist and his grandfather, an oil executive. He hadn’t thought much about this until faced with the irony of how plastics return hydrocarbons (sometimes sourced from oil) to the ocean via industrial chemistry. To my mind, Plastic Ocean represents a new genre of books about pollution, health and the environment written by the second and third generations of the Plastics and Chemical Age — or, put differently, by the children and grandchildren of those employed by major 20th-century industries. What the writer Susan Griffin has called a ‘generation of conscience.’ Other examples include Plume , written by Kathleen Flenniken, the former Washington State Poet Laureate. Flenniken grew up near the Hanford Plutonium reactor, which was built during World War Two and where Flenniken’s father had worked. Another poet, Debora Gregor, likewise drew on her father’s life at Hanford for the poems collected in Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters . Christine Walley, in Exit Zero , writes about her father’s life in Chicago’s steel mills as they closed. These works have been my companions as I learn how to write in a way that spans memoir and environmental sociology. For a time in the 1960s and early 1970s my father made Bakelite, the first fully-synthetic (i.e., fossil fuel-derived) plastic, and also polystyrene and polyethylene. So for me, plastics —and particularly marine plastics — are where the personal and the sociological collide. I spent my graduate school years studying the science, history, legacy and distribution of POPs, and the years since, studying plastics. At sea, my father’s plastics and the chemicals I’ve spent years studying combine, and then climb the food chain, possibly even infiltrate our water supply, before becoming a part of us. All the books I have chosen are acts of bearing witness, and all raise the visibility of forms of pollution that are otherwise hard to see or sense in their material form and/or in their consequences. And so one of the themes that I hope shines through is the significance of the act of witnessing. These books have all been influential, and as a result, all stand as testaments to the cascading influence one person can have. I was recently corresponding with Max Liboiron, the scholar I mentioned earlier, whose remarkable civic plastics laboratory I visited last spring. Over email, we discussed how many of the general audience books about plastics (and also chemical burdens) explore the global nature of these problems and then pair that with a chapter on things individuals can do in response. This creates a major and problematic mismatch in scales. “Addressing consumption is important. But individuals can have far more influence as citizens or —as these books show— as witnesses and artists. ” Sandra Steingraber writes about this discrepancy in Living Downstream , and how it can sink us into a state of ‘well-informed futility.’ Though addressing consumption is important, such approaches –with their listicles of ten things you can buy or not buy, as the case may be– reduce individuals to mere consumers. But individuals can have far more influence, for example, as citizens, or as these books show, as witnesses and artists. Alternatively, one can move up one level of influence to affect change in the purchasing and consumption practices in their communities, workplaces, schools and places of worship. Informed individuals can act locally, regionally and collectively to shift, for example, consumption, waste and land use policies, or to engage, as Moore writes, in citizen science to source (and then address) pulses of new plastics into marine systems. As a group, these books make three additional points on the topic of what can be done. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One is that pollution can be almost impossible to clean up and hard to control; but when industries begin with the end in mind, significant progress can be made to prevent pollution in the first place. One example is training chemists and chemical engineers in toxicology, endocrinology, and atmospheric and marine biochemistry. What kinds of new materials and molecules would come forth from minds taught to think systemically? In the meantime, Charles Moore brings up a related policy, wherein producers assume the responsibility for the end-life of the materials (plastics or waste products) they put into the world. “What if rivers and oceans were given legal standing? What about the rights of future generations to an inhabitable planet with potable water and arable land? ” The second point is that pollution is not solely an environmental issue. Taken together, these books argue, it is also a matter of rights — civil rights and human rights and even — as Moore presents — nature’s rights. What if rivers and oceans were given legal standing? Or, in Steingraber’s case, what about the rights of future generations to an inhabitable planet with potable water and arable land? It might not seem like much, but a shift of environmental issues from property law into rights law would mark a seismic shift, a point often made by the environmental lawyer Carolyn Raffensperger (best known for her work on the precautionary principle). Finally, these five books point our collective focus ‘upstream’, to the source or root of pollution. Pollution can be understood as tied into other pressing social problems, and those institutions that enact racism, colonialism , and economic oppression. The take-away is that work in one of area can have ripple effects in others, and so: all of our combined efforts can matter."