LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
PLASTIC CULTURE
BY ODI L E MADDEN M
ost of the world’s Laysan al- batrosses breed on Midway Island, a small atoll in the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from Honolulu and
2,400 miles from the nearest continent. Each year, thousands of their chicks ingest colorful plastic bits, and their mummified bodies tes- tify to our throwaway lifestyle. An enormous amount of plastic floats
in the world’s oceans, and it comes from many sources – nets, floats, buoys, construc- tion materials, packing straps, pallets and expanded polystyrene foam. The plastic in the albatross chicks has a high proportion of discarded “disposable” plastic items such as the screw caps from water and soda bottles, cigarette lighters, cutlery and toothbrushes. These are things designed for short-term or one-time use. Once discarded, many make their way to the ocean where they are picked from the surface by albatrosses and other seabirds hunting for food. The parents feed the plastic to their chicks, who cannot digest it and slowly weaken, never growing strong enough to fly. The dead birds also symbolize something
larger. When there were fewer people, when we had fewer things, we made implements from materials that we considered valuable. We did not throw them away carelessly and in the name of so-called convenience. When we did toss things, we might have been excused for thinking there was an “away” – a place where we could discard what we no longer needed. The albatrosses, in photographs that fly around the Internet and print media, show us that there is no more “away.” There is no place to put our waste where it doesn’t have 14 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2015
consequences for us and for the ecosystems on which we depend, not even in the most remote islands. This does not mean plastic is evil. It is stuff
that we invented, and we choose how to use it. Some of that ingenuity has been put to rather spectacular goals. Early plastics like celluloid relieved pressure on now-endangered wild animal populations, elephants, sea turtles and others, that were over-hunted for their tusks and shells to make things we now make from plastic. Plastic helped us fly and walk on the moon. Developments in plastic also help us repair and even replace our body parts. Bags for blood, injectable medicine and single-use lab-ware have made medical treatment and testing, for people and other animals, more accessible, which has increased life expec- tancies worldwide. For sterile, inexpensive medical equipment the cost of disposability is counterbalanced by our increased well-being. Plastic food packaging is another 20th
cen-
tury achievement, but it is simultaneously one of our big challenges. On one hand, the prac- tice slows spoilage, reduces food-borne illness and lets us transport fresh and manufactured foods far from their sources. But dispos- able packaging also generates a tremendous amount of waste that is discarded as litter, or clogs landfills or at best is recycled. There are significant costs to our towns, our sense of well-being and ecosystems near and very distant from us. Disposability was not always the norm.
Before the days of supermarkets and conve- nience stores, when you bought something liquid, the container was on loan. Soda pop and beer required a cash deposit that you got Continued on page 18
IMAGE BY CINEMATOGRAPHER JAN VOZENILEK (
JANVOZENILEK.COM)
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