Thanks to Jayne Wilkinson, “Bodies Beneath,” Drain (Junk Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) → for pointing me to Italo Calvino’s text.
In his forthcoming book, journalist Vince Beiser traces the black market of sand, noting that the seeming ubiquitous substance is actually under threat, disappearing, and often controlled by organized crime. Sand, he notes, is the most used natural resource in the world: “Sand is the thing modern cities are made of.” Vince Beiser, “The World’s Disappearing Sand,” New York Times, June 23, 2016 →.
Many beaches now have to be maintained, as human impact has undermined the natural life cycle of beaches. Dams on rivers, industry, building, and so on have all impacted beaches, such that many have to be resupplied with sand, often termed “nourishment sand.”
Kenneth Weiss, “Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2006 →.
Atlas Obscura, “Kamilo Beach” →.
Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA Today, vol. 24, no. 6 (June 2014) →.
Colin N. Waters et al., “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct From the Holocene,” Science, vol. 351, no. 6269 (January 8, 2016) →.
Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon.”
Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” e-flux journal 75 (September 2016) →. Other terms, such as Haraway’s “Chthulucene,” or “the Capitolocene” and others, are also useful, though the proliferation of neologisms may simply work to cloud the issue of whether we are in an era distinct from the Holocene.
Susan Freinkel, “A Brief History of Plastic’s Conquest of the World,” Scientific American, May 29, 2011 →.
Ibid. Most household plastics are synthetic organic compounds. They are synthetic (human-made), organic (carbon-based) chains of monomers.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 110–11.
Many of the oil fields in North America, among them the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, the tar sands in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and deposits in the Arctic, are on land that has never been ceded. Further, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been oft characterized as an act of neocolonialism for oil.
Lighters are manufactured all over the world: BIC maintains factories in France, Spain, Brazil, and the United States. Zippo also manufactures in the United States. The vast majority of cheap plastic lighters, however, are manufactured in China and Taiwan, many of these in the Chinese city of Wenzhou. Michael Backman, Inside Knowledge: Streetwise in Asia (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 23.
Pam Longobardi, “The Ocean Gleaner,” Drain (Junk Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) →.
Andrés Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean,” PNAS vol. 111, no. 28 (July 15, 2014): 2 →.
Heather Davis, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015) →.
Plasticizers are correlated with infertility, recurrent miscarriages, early-onset puberty, obesity, diabetes, reduced brain development, cancer, and neurological disorders such as early-onset senility in adults. Ibid.
Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon.”
Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean,” 1.
Ibid.
Davis, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene.”
Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon.”
This passage echoes and draws from some of the theories around object-oriented ontology, among them Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. In fact, Morton’s work is applied to a discussion of plastiglomerate in the catalogue for “Another Land … And in the Other, Our Own,” an exhibition that took place in Norway in 2015 (Ian Cofre, “Another Land … And in the Other, Our Own,” Prosjektrom Normanns, 2015). “Nature-culture,” Bruno Latour’s term for the intermixture of the organic and human-made, could also be applicable.
Celina Jeffery and Ian Buchanan, “Introduction,” Drain (Junk Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) →.
Ibid.
Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (London: Viking, 2012), 1–20.
Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean,” 6.
Hypotheses include sink processes that take place through micro-fragmentation and submersion into the sediment, or ingestion by marine organisms, specifically mesopelagic fish, who in eating and defecating the plastic add weight to it that causes the formerly buoyant substance to sink to the bottom—in sum, “microplastic fragments could also reach the bottom via defecation,” a proposition, it is noted, that requires further quantitative testing. Cózar et. al, “Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean,” 2–5.
Ian Buchanan, “What Must We Do About the Rubbish?” Drain (Junk Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) →.
Erik R. Zettler, Tracy J. Mincer, and Linda A. Amaral-Zettler, “Life in the ‘Plastisphere’: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris,” Environmental Science and Technology 47 (2013): 137−46. The importance of microbes to ocean, and hence planetary, health, cannot be underestimated. It is not yet proven but hypothesized that plastics in the ocean will attract and allow the proliferation of certain kinds of microbes, thus altering the chemical makeup of the world’s oceans.
Buchanan, “What Must We Do About the Rubbish?”
Ocean currents are extremely complex, and at depth, remain only partially understood and mapped.
Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean,” 1.
Daniel Engber, “There is No Island of Trash in the Pacific,” Slate, September 12, 2016: →; Max Liboiron, “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics,” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 21, no. 1 (December 2015). Liboiron’s article focuses on the distinction between plastic polymers (nontoxic) and the hormone-disrupting plasticizers added to those polymers (toxic). The idea that plastic itself is not toxic, but plasticizers are, massively complicates the stories of harm that can be told about plastics, and confuses meanings of pollution, health, and harm.
Lucas van der Velden and Rosa Menkman, “Dark Matters: An Interview with Susan Schuppli,” Dark Ecology, 2016 →.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–20.
Caroline Picard, “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd,” Bad at Sports, August 23, 2016 →.
Zoe Todd, “Fish Pluralities: Human-Animal Relations and Sites of Engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Circle,” Inuit Studies, vol. 38, no. 1–2 (2014): 217–38.
Distinct from but paralleling Todd’s argument is that of Rob Nixon, who addresses what he calls environmental “slow violence,” the violence enacted by extraction, emissions, and pollution, which unveils itself slowly across time, as an “unevenly universal” burden, one that will tend to be experienced inequitably. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” PhiloSOPHIA, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 233.
Elise Lammer, “Review,” Mousse Magazine, July 19, 2014 →.
Jodi Dean, “The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change,” e-flux journal 69 (January 2016) →. Dean is not totally on board with art-science collaboration, which she sees as a repetition of past failed experiments writ anew. She argues for an anamorphic approach to climate change activism—an approach from the side. Perhaps our approach to plastiglomerate fits this criteria, moving beyond a traditional art-science collaboration.
Davis, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene.”
Peter Hodgins and Peter Thompson, “Taking the Romance out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze,” Environmental Communication, vol. 5, no. 4 (2011).
See Heather Davis on the molecular: H. Davis, “Molecular Intimacy,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), 205–11.
Heather Davis, “The Land and Water and Air That We Are: Some Thoughts on COP 21,” NYAQ, March 15, 2016 →.
I would like to thank Kelly Jazvac and Kelly Wood for their help with this text. It was written in my role as writer for the project “Understanding Plastics Pollution: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Forensic Methodology,” developed by the Great Lakes Plastics Pollution Think Tank at Western University, Canada.