There’s a scene in the Jim Henson film Labyrinth where the protagonist Sarah is trying to get help from Hoggle, a creature of the labyrinth. She offers him her bracelet. Intrigued, he says, “What is that anyway?” and she shrugs and replies, “Plastic,” and impressed, he replies, “Oohhhhh.” I’ve seen the movie more times than I can count and until recently I always read the scene as humorous. I now find myself thinking that it’s actually one more of the many tricksterish, hidden-in-plain-sight moments of profundity in the film.
In episode #156 (or encore #294) of the For the Wild podcast, Ayana Young interviews Dr. Max Liboiron, an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where they direct The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research also known as CLEAR. Their discussion focuses on plastic, and like all For the Wild episodes, its connection to the wellbeing of our planet. Truly everyone needs to just go listen to that episode because I find myself wanting to simply cite the whole interview. What stuck with me from that episode was both a history of plastics I did not know, and the idea that maybe my relationship to plastic is all wrong.
Liboiron says, “I’m not saying, ‘Yay plastic, let’s plastic it up…’ but there are certain things that plastic is good at, and that we need it for, and certain things that shouldn’t be used for, like packaging. Packaging can get used for a few minutes…you’ve used one of the most durable materials in the world, to do it. If I ran a design class, I would fail the students who turned in, you know, the temporary use with the longest-lived material combination sort of design idea.” Later in the episode Liboiron pushes further though, suggesting that we need to look at why, and under what conditions it made sense for such a thing to occur. The answer, unsurprisingly, has a lot to do with making money. Once scientists got it right, plastic became one of the most durable materials on the planet. But durable items don’t make money. Liboiron explains some of the history of plastics in the twentieth century in the United States: “Lloyd Stouffer, who is in the packaging industry from Modern Plastics, said, ‘The future of plastic is in the trash can.’ He said this in the [19]30’s at a huge industry conglomerate sort of conference. And what he meant was, and you can look this up, this is readily available, what he meant was, ‘We need to find ways to remove plastic through households, not into households and then they stay.’ And so he talked about disposability as the thing that would lead away from these saturated consumer markets and sort of make this giant beautiful hole, where plastics would go into it and people just throw money, right, into this nice conveyor belt. And so, that was a very strategic effort, strategic plan, but the problem was because society was, like, making do, repairing, and not spending, they had to be taught how to waste.”
So initially people were hesitant to waste plastic, but fast forward just a few generations and now we look at plastic as cheap. It’s this cheapening that I’ve been thinking a lot about. In my last post I talked very briefly about how our current economic system requires “cheap” things (please go read The History of the World in 7 Cheap Things by Raj Patel). People consciously made plastic into a cheap material that makes cheap products. There was a decision to use plastic as a throw away or use it inappropriately as key parts in tools, appliances and machines where it either hasn’t been made as durable as it can be, or is the wrong material for the job – and therefore it is likely to break, requiring a new purchase. We know how to make durable plastic and use it well, but it’s more valuable, more important to make money than it is to make something that lasts. Plastic could be amazing, but instead it has been cheapened. We could live in world where we, like Hoggle, are impressed, even dazzled by plastic.
It seems to me, that if we want to save ourselves from ecosystem collapse, that we need to fall back in love, not just with the birch and the fox and the salmon, but also with the plastic and the cement and all of our other manmade things. Because when we love something, then we value it, we cherish it, we want the best possible outcome for it. For me personally, it feels very difficult to love plastic. I’ve been conditioned to think about it as something without value. But it does have value, it’s actually quite incredible—an amazing substance that humans co-created with oil from the planet. And it’s helpful for me to remember that oil is the result of ancient marine life being broken down and transformed over millions of years. All that plastic in my house used to be alive in the sea.
I don’t want to live a life where the value of things and beings are determined by how available it is as a resource. Racism is a devaluing of other humans—its buying into a set of beliefs that some humans are less valuable. It’s what makes it easy or justifiable for people to uphold structures that oppress people. I can’t relate to people who want to categorize people in this way, but I can now understand how easy it is to accept value statements without questioning them. I by no means want to suggest that all we have to do is love things and everything will be fine. But I do believe that curiosity, creativity, problem-solving, openness, and optimism thrive in an environment of love, and languish in the realm of disgust. If I am looking at plastic in disgust, as I often have, am I really seeing the generative solutions available to me and others? And perhaps I will never love plastic, but if I form a relationship to it – if I pause to see its strengths and beauty, and re-value it in my life, then I can be more discerning about the problem—and the problem isn’t plastic, it’s what we do with it and why. Liboiron touches on the idea of kinship with plastic, and the complexities that introduces—we all know how complex family can be. I am much more compelled to grapple with solutions in those kind of spaces.
Please go listen to the podcast because there’s so much good stuff in it. And if you feel compelled, join me in cultivating a bit of awe with the plastics around you—after all, in the vein of Sagan’s thinking: if we are all stardust, then our plastics are sea-stars. (Ok, figuratively, not positive when starfish came along).