{"id":2865,"date":"2011-03-06T09:56:50","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T14:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=2865"},"modified":"2011-05-27T08:49:24","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T13:49:24","slug":"plastic-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/06\/plastic-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discard Studies<\/a> shares Max Liboiron’s engrossing, and depressing, account of the ocean’s toxic soup of plastics.<\/p>\n

A few quotes:<\/p>\n

“The best conservative estimate we have is that there are 315 billion pounds of plastic<\/a> in the ocean. For comparison, The Gulf Spill spewed roughly 2.5 million pounds of oil per day at its peak.\u00a0 That makes it would take 345 years of oil leaking to reach the same amount of plastic that is already in the ocean.” […]<\/p>\n

“Both body burdens and ocean plastics are folded into complex living systems rather than operating as discrete poisons or foreign trespassers. Plastics are mistaken as food; they move up the food chain. Endocrine disruptors act like hormones\u2014bodies don\u2019t reject them, they use them. Both become part of a living system. So the idea of a discrete, traceable effluent scientists can clearly correlate with one health effect is no longer valid.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Plastics are not objects so much as they are processes, together making up a larger, global process we might call “plasticization.” Understanding the intricacies of plasticization — its different forms, rates\/velocities, and possibilities for intervention — is something we’re only beginning to do. The “21st century theory” of plastics Liboiron calls for advances on the previous century’s by recognizing the ubiquity and insidious globality of this process and its devastating effects on systems and bodies everywhere.<\/p>\n

Read the whole article<\/a> at your own peril.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discard Studies shares Max Liboiron’s engrossing, and depressing, account of the ocean’s toxic soup of plastics. A few quotes: “The best conservative estimate we have is that there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the ocean. For comparison, The Gulf Spill spewed roughly 2.5 million pounds of oil per day at its peak.\u00a0 That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196],"tags":[15843,221,17826,17827],"class_list":["post-2865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","tag-crisis","tag-environment","tag-plastic-planet","tag-toxic-planet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-Kd","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1149,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/11\/04\/polar-bears-for-green-blogs\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":0},"title":"polar bears for green blogs","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This blog was added to the Directory of Best Green Blogs earlier today. To honor that I thought I would re-post a link to one of my favorite climate change related videos: the plastic bag polar bears emerging from the subway vent and melting back into them (i.e., the Environmental\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/vl4pVLZ8Czg\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1281,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/05\/29\/night-of-the-living-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":1},"title":"night of the living dead","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"An oil spill is a kind of night of the living dead, in which dead organic matter that we have called from its grave rises and strangles the living.","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"4642014598_2c94f60962.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/05\/4642014598_2c94f60962.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7993,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/01\/17\/anthropocenic-reckoning\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":2},"title":"Anthropocenic reckoning","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it's easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here's more on the \"dating the ecocrisis\" theme... Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":3},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10194,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/08\/22\/sobering-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":4},"title":"Sobering up…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 22, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Peter Brannen's Atlantic article \"The Anthropocene is a Joke\" provides a helpful cold shower for those who've gotten a little too drunk on the concept of the Anthropocene. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few snippets: \"What humans are doing on the planet, then, unless we endure\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6525,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/02\/25\/vik-muniz-his-waste-pickers\/","url_meta":{"origin":2865,"position":5},"title":"Vik Muniz & his waste pickers","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Here are my introductory comments to the 2010 documentary Waste Land, delivered yesterday at the Fleming Museum in Burlington and shown in connection with the exhibition High Trash, which runs until May 19. http:\/\/vimeo.com\/16290358 Every society implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that things have an ending, and that that ending is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2865"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4273,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865\/revisions\/4273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}