Plastic Pollution and Poetry

How American poets contend with the downstream consequences of today’s ecological crises.

by MARGARET RONDA

CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, the world marked Earth Day, the theme of which was plastic pollution. Environmental organizers around the globe are calling for increased awareness of plastic consumption and its protracted environmental effects, and hope to achieve a dramatic reduction in plastic pollution by Earth Day 2020. Contemporary poets, too, have been calling attention to the impacts of plastic on ecosystems and biospheric processes in their writings. In “The Age of Plastic,” a piece published in a recent anthology on the poetry of climate change, Chamorro eco-poet Craig Santos Perez catalogs the innumerable ways plastics are embedded in contemporary life. Found in household goods and medical products, technological, military, and transportation networks, bodily interiors and industrial processes, this synthetic material plays an enabling role in virtually all spheres of human activity. Perez highlights some of its beneficial, life-sustaining applications:

plastic keeps food fresh—
delivers medication and clean water—
forms cable and clothes—
ropes and nets—even
stops bullets—
“plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies”—

In other sections, Perez explores how plastics facilitate the prenatal development, birth, and newborn care of his infant daughter, pointing to the birth tub in which his wife labors, the Ziploc bag holding the placenta, the plastic nipple that feeds his baby milk. Drawing together this personal description of plastic’s role in his own family’s reproductive dynamics with the larger imbrications of plastic in everyday existence, Perez portrays plastic as an intimate container for and enabler of bodily experience. He wryly contrasts this synthetic substance against the delicate, vulnerable bodies of new baby and mother, calling attention to the uncanny endurance of the “perfect creation” of plastic.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration.

Across a half-century, Perez’s consideration of the ubiquity of plastics echoes philosopher Roland Barthes’ meditation in his classic study of postwar Western culture, Mythologies. Writing in 1957, Barthes argues that with the rise of plastics, “the hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all.” He continues, “the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself.” While plastics were first developed in the early twentieth century, their production expanded rapidly during the 1950s and early 1960s with new technological advances. Chemical firms turned attention to consumer markets, developing plastic products to fulfill myriad needs and functions. Barthes lists a series of objects built for long-term use—“suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or paper”—but increasingly, the petrochemical industry embarked on a more profitable venture: disposable products and packaging. Today, fully half of all plastics manufactured become trash in under a year, according to a recent study. Foreseeing the substitution of various organic materials in a vast range of goods with this industrially designed substance, Barthes praises the miraculous properties of plastic as a mark of anthropogenic power. “The very itinerary of plastic gives [humans] the euphoria of prestigious freewheeling through Nature,” he writes.

What Barthes does not foresee in his celebratory mid-century portrait of plastic are the devastating ecological implications of this material’s natural “itinerary.” The production of plastics by the petrochemical industry is energy intensive and fossil fuel dependent. For each ounce of polyethylene produced, an ounce of carbon dioxide is emitted, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if the components of plastic production bear a significant carbon footprint, the ongoing presence of plastic after consumer use bears an even more weighty environmental impact. Only around 9 percent of plastic goods are recycled, and the remainder ends up in landfills, decomposing over about 500 years and leaching harmful pollutants into soil and waterways. Vast quantities of plastic can be found in the earth’s oceans, accumulating in garbage patches and riverways and threatening aquatic life. BPA (bisphenol A) and other chemicals in plastics have been linked to various harmful effects on human health as well. And plastic’s lasting planetary effects are beginning to be visible in the geological record. Geologists have recently discovered a new kind of stone on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii, termed a “plastiglomerate,” composed of plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris, indicating a new planetary marker of anthropogenic activity. In “The Age of Plastic,” Perez chronicles these various toxic effects of plastic on biospheric life, focusing particularly on its devastating impact on marine ecosystems, and wonders, “Will plastic make / life impossible?”

Remainders » examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration. Beginning after 1945 and continuing in our present, the Great Acceleration is an era of cataclysmic transformations in the earth’s systems and processes, from global warming to changes in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles and massive biodiversity loss. As I argue in Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End, these transformations, occurring at a variety of scales, can be understood as the ongoing consequence of the forms of accumulation and extractivist logics of capitalism’s productive relations. The accelerating global production and consumption of plastic—over 9 billion tons of which has been produced since 1950, the vast majority in the last decade—presents one instance of the broader eco-historical dynamics arising in this period, where productive innovations lead to intensifying imbalances in ecological relations at various scales.

In American poetry of this era, we can discover sustained literary reflections on these dynamics. A wide variety of poets consider questions of environmental persistence, transformation, and loss, often by attending to the strange temporalities and uncanny material forms that emblematize this period’s calamitous changes. With their sustained attention to affective and relational dynamics, their ability to draw together multiple scales and time frames, and their narrative open-endedness, ecologically oriented poetries provide an especially rich cultural site for approaching the complexities of postwar biospheric alterations. Echoing Roland Barthes’ prescient portrayal of “life itself” as becoming “plasticized,” many contemporary poets, including Allison Cobb, Lyz Soto, Adam Dickinson, Evelyn Reilly, CA Conrad, and others have turned particular attention to plastic as a substance that illuminates the broader conditions of life in an era of biospheric crisis. Interested in the dynamic nature of its form as it takes on myriad new shapes, ecopoets explore the way plastic becomes a material emblem of postwar technological ingenuity and productive growth; yet they also chart how its remaindered presences signify new dimensions of environmental harm.

A wide variety of poets consider questions of environmental persistence, transformation, and loss.

For Perez, plastic is also a material that illuminates the pronounced ecological impacts on vulnerable populations and locales. Across his writings on the ecosystems and indigenous lifeworlds of Guam and Hawaii, Perez chronicles the devastating ecological legacies that shape everyday island life, writing of plastic washing up on O’ahu’s shores and filling the bellies of marine mammals and birds. He connects these toxic inheritances with the effects of radioactive fallout and climate change on island habitats, pointing to the longstanding histories of colonialism and capitalism that have produced these conditions of ecological vulnerability. Considering these precarious conditions, Perez asks, in his recent work, from unincorporated territory [lukao]), what is the “great future” for those born on these islands, and for island species and habitats? He writes, “What will our children / be able to harvest in this paradise of fugitive / d  u  s  t?” Such difficult, perhaps unanswerable poetic questions task readers with thinking beyond the annual awareness-raising activities of Earth Day and their language of consumer responsibility. Instead, these meditations on the matter, time, and form of plastics and other Great Acceleration phenomena confront us with the uneven histories and futures, as well as with the collective responsibilities, that we face in a time of unprecedented systemic change.

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Margaret Ronda is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her collection of poetry, Personification, was the winner of the 2009 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End.