Synthetic Ocean
From "Moby Duck, Or the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood," by Donovan Hohn from Harper's Magazine, January 2007.
The California Coastal Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial state agency, estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean, never mind the invisible pieces Charlie Moore has gone trawling for. Based on the samples he collected, Morre calculates that in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre there are now six pounds of plastic for every one pound of zooplankton. Zooplankton such as salps, a kind of chordate jellyfish that feed by pumping seawater through their gelatinous bodies and straining out the nutrients, ingest bits of plastic far too small to catch an albatross's eye. But the journey of the toys won't end there, in the watery belly of a salp. Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of grass, the pulverized, photodegraded remains of that hollow duck of mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food chain, scattering toxins in their wake.
............................
Another incongruity: in 1878, nine years after the invention of celluloid, a sales brochure promoted it as the salvation of the world. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the copy ran, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." A hundred years later, in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem was "our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology." That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both partly, paradoxically, right. Petroleum did save the whale, plastics did save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not exist without them. Besides, they consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport then most alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won. With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar, we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six pack rings, and what lingering anxieties remain we leave at the curbside with the recycling.
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something-anything-could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting. The flotsam Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers find is not only incongruous, it's uncanny, in the Freudian sense-a repressed fact breaking forth with the shock of strangeness into our conscious minds. As he, Charlie Moore, and other oceanographers can tell you, the ocean does not so easily forget. Chemically, it remembers. An environmental geochemist at the University of Tokyo has shown that on the open sea polyethylene acts as a toxin sponge, attracting and concentrating free floating non-water-soluble chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, that are safe only as long as they remain inert. .....
................
A PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to your child, but no one yet knows how post-consumer plastics that escape the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing. In the meantime, Ebbesmeyer worries that plastic could do to our civilization what lead did to the Romans. He thinks the garbage patch may betoken nothing less then "the end of the ocean." The seas have become synthetic. The planet is sick. It can no longer recycle its ingredients, or purge itself of pollutants.
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if 10,000 years from now archaeologists come looking for us, they will find a trail of plastic clues. It will be easy to date us by our artifacts. At the rate we're burning and extruding fossil fuels, the age of petrochemical plastics promises to be relatively short.
The California Coastal Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial state agency, estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean, never mind the invisible pieces Charlie Moore has gone trawling for. Based on the samples he collected, Morre calculates that in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre there are now six pounds of plastic for every one pound of zooplankton. Zooplankton such as salps, a kind of chordate jellyfish that feed by pumping seawater through their gelatinous bodies and straining out the nutrients, ingest bits of plastic far too small to catch an albatross's eye. But the journey of the toys won't end there, in the watery belly of a salp. Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of grass, the pulverized, photodegraded remains of that hollow duck of mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food chain, scattering toxins in their wake.
............................
Another incongruity: in 1878, nine years after the invention of celluloid, a sales brochure promoted it as the salvation of the world. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the copy ran, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." A hundred years later, in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem was "our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology." That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both partly, paradoxically, right. Petroleum did save the whale, plastics did save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not exist without them. Besides, they consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport then most alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won. With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar, we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six pack rings, and what lingering anxieties remain we leave at the curbside with the recycling.
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something-anything-could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting. The flotsam Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers find is not only incongruous, it's uncanny, in the Freudian sense-a repressed fact breaking forth with the shock of strangeness into our conscious minds. As he, Charlie Moore, and other oceanographers can tell you, the ocean does not so easily forget. Chemically, it remembers. An environmental geochemist at the University of Tokyo has shown that on the open sea polyethylene acts as a toxin sponge, attracting and concentrating free floating non-water-soluble chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, that are safe only as long as they remain inert. .....
................
A PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to your child, but no one yet knows how post-consumer plastics that escape the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing. In the meantime, Ebbesmeyer worries that plastic could do to our civilization what lead did to the Romans. He thinks the garbage patch may betoken nothing less then "the end of the ocean." The seas have become synthetic. The planet is sick. It can no longer recycle its ingredients, or purge itself of pollutants.
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if 10,000 years from now archaeologists come looking for us, they will find a trail of plastic clues. It will be easy to date us by our artifacts. At the rate we're burning and extruding fossil fuels, the age of petrochemical plastics promises to be relatively short.
posted by Jon at 5:07 AM
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