It appears from our family's gathering by the Christmas tree this year that the current trending gift, at least in the kitchen utensil department, is the silicon spatula. The appeal of this device is that it offers an alternative to the usual plastic spatula that the rest of us still use—and which is feared to be one of the sources of the microplastic particles that are constantly leaching into our food and bodies.
The last time I read into this issue at all, it was still unclear if microplastics are actually a bad thing. That is to say, there are any number of broad trends in public health that they could be causing—endocrine disruption, declining sperm count and fertility, etc. But we don't actually know at this point if they are the primary cause—or even a major factor. Any number of things could be responsible.
What creeps us out about microplastics, therefore, is not so much what we know about their effects—but simply the fact that they are everywhere. So if they are causing a problem, it's a big one. A haunting New York Times essay from a couple years ago lays this out well. There is now no part of the globe—however remote or sparsely populated—that is free of it. Every animal and human has been exposed.
Microplastics, in short, cover "every scrap of the living earth," to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence. They have been found in the bodies of sea birds at the most far-flung corners of the planet. Even people living in tiny Arctic villages that are seemingly cut off from other societies have microplastics in their blood. In short, it's everywhere, and in everything—including every part of our bodies.
From the very beginning of the craze for plastics, in the mid-twentieth century, this has been part of the dread they inspire. There is something existentially horrifying about the way the substance seems to proliferate with time. The ubiquity of plastic, and the fact that it is so hard to ever truly dispose of, makes us fear the specter of being subsumed within it—being replaced by our own plastic waste.
Roland Barthes included an essay in this vein in his 1957 classic, Mythologies, published at the very dawn of the plastic era. The piece reads now as remarkably prescient, given our current moral panic about the ubiquity and ineradicability of microplastics. The core existential anxiety that Barthes identifies is the same one we have today—the fear of being swallowed up by our own plastic creations:
The hierarchy of substances is abolished, he writes. [A] single one replaces them all. The whole world can be plasticized. (Howard/Lavers trans.) This is the same dread we experience when we learn that microplastics have been found in the genitalia of people living, say, in the deepest Amazon. No place is safe. No one is immune. We're all half-plastic now. We've all become plasticized.
We dread this in part because it seems to subvert the ratio of creation to destruction that we suppose civilization was designed to maintain. We dream that modern society has made possible new forms of cooperation in the taming of chaos. But when we see the waste products of our plastic empire proliferating, it makes us fear the opposite: that entropy, quite to the contrary, is winning.
As Donald Barthelme once wrote in his 1967 postmodern retelling of the Snow White story: "Now you’re probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965 […] and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because it’s been going up[.]"
The trash, in other words, is winning. "Now at such a point," Barthelme continues, "you will agree the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities [...] And there can no longer be any question of ‘disposing’ of it, because it's all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to ‘dig’ it—that’s slang, but peculiarly appropriate here." (Emphasis added.)
Can we in fact learn to "appreciate" the plastic waste clogging up our arteries and genitals—since at some point it may be all that's left? The haunting New York Times piece cited above points to one eerie evolutionary possibility. It reminds us that in David Cronenberg's latest film, he imagines a future development of humanity that has indeed learned to "dig" plastic trash—namely, by ingesting it for food.
The reign of Cronenberg's "plastic-eaters" may soon be upon us.
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