Allison Cobb - Plastic: An Autobiography

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ALLISON COBB

Nightboat Books
New York

Copyright 2021 by Allison Cobb

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

Print ISBN: 978-1-64362-038-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-102-9

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover photograph courtesy of Jerry Takigawa from the False Food series (2010). The plastic in the image was collected by scientists from the remains of albatross on Midway Island and loaned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Design and typesetting by HR Hegnauer

Text set in Athelas and Requiem

Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

Nightboat Books

New York

www.nightboat.org

Knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world.

Karen Barad

GIFT:
THE THING

I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

Rebecca Solnit

The thing turned up in a corner of the yard, just outside the fence. I found it when I went out to take Quincy for a walk. Curved and black, plastic. Four feet long, a foot at its widest. I thought at first it was a car bumper. I put it in the grass by the porch. The next morning it was still there. I sat next to it in the sun and looked closely.

It was not the first piece of plastic junk I had sat staring at. For nearly a year, Id been picking up all the plastic I found on my daily dog walk. Id been arranging it into patterns, taking photographs. Id been storing it all up in plastic garbage bags on the back porch.

I didnt know exactly why I was doing this. I wanted to understand something. Plastic on the dog walk. Plastic on visits to the beach. Plastic studding the ground, everywhere I looked. I gathered it all up.

I am the no and the yes

A line from the poet Annah Sobelmans first book. It has lived with me for years, sometimes whispering through my mind in its old remembered rhythm. In the poem, Sobelman follows the line with a qualifying phrase. She narrows it, makes it domestic, but I want the raw declaration, hanging there on the turn of itself:

I am the no

and the yes

For nearly half my life, I have worked for an environmental group. I spend most of my days in front of a computer screen, taking in a deluge of information about planetary trauma and emergency.

Most of it floods through metoo vast to grasp. But plastic was a shard that stuck. Plastic I could touch, and it could touch me back.

On this day, as I sat beside the car part, I was thinking about the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, his essay called The Thing. His book Poetry, Language, Thought had sat on my shelf, unopened, for more than a decade since graduate school. A few days earlier, on a whim, I picked it up.

Heidegger writes that distance disappears and all things come equally close because of technology. In 1949, when he wrote the essay, he meant airplanes, the radio, TV. These inventions bring everything before us in image and sound: ancient Egyptian pyramids, a cat in Japan, glaciers shearing off into Arctic waters. Everything flattens outa uniform distanceless, as he calls it.

But this does not make anything present. The only way to approach a thing, to bring it near, is by sidling up to it, by thinking around, or through, what appears obvious. He performs this kind of meditation on the thingness of a clay jug.

I thought of meditating on this cart part. It had a smooth surface, shiny. One side was flecked with light splash marks from mud or paint. It formed a complicated shapewide at one end and tapered at the other, with holes and slats and ridges all along its length. The widest end contained deep score marks, some scratched all the way through the plastic. It was stiff but still pliant. Without the car body to hold its curved shape, it folded in half like a wing at its narrowest point.

The image that came to me was an albatross carcass bursting with plastic. This was the first shard that stuck, a snippet in a news story about a piece of plastic from World War II, found inside a dead albatross chick sixty years later. It stayed in my mind for years, like the no and the yes.

I dragged the car part inside the house. Nearly ten years later it sits beside me, near my desk. I learned this: that the world is not broken. Or that it has always been shards, kaleidoscopically interwoven, not one world, many, threaded through one another, like fungus hyphae through soil.

Worlds end. As Kathryn Yusoff points out in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, some worlds have ended over and over, lives consumed and discarded by individuals woven into systems that give them life-and-death power. Like settler colonialism, like capitalism, these are systems built by humans, but they exceed individuals. They extend across generations and geographiesplanet-scale forces of destruction.

Plastic waste stems from this consume-and-dispose violence. I learned that waste is not an unintended consequence of a miracle new technology. Waste is inherent in plastic production as it accelerated after World War II.

In 1945, days before the U.S. military incinerated two cities with atomic bombs, a DuPont executive looked forward to the end of the war and the surge of buying that would follow as soldiers returned home and bought houses and cars, washing machines and refrigerators. The job ahead, he told a group of marketing experts: See to it that Americans are never satisfied.

Plastic embodies this infinite desire. Conjured out of gas and oilthe seemingly endless reservoirs of dead plants and animals underlying Earthplastic transmutes death into eternal life. The word plastic refers not to any specific object, just the quality of a materialthat it is capable of taking shape, an endless stream of shapes.

Objects formed from plastic ease suffering and save livesartificial hearts, IV bags, the tubes snaking out of a respirator. Plastic makes cars safer, airplanes lighter, and delivers drinking water. The single largest use of plastic, though, is for containing other objects. Forty percent of plastic goes into packaging, to be used once and then discarded, driving endless demand for more.

Companies work to keep these facts hidden. When the evidence becomes too overwhelmingplastic clogging roadsides, oceans, living bodiescompanies shift responsibility onto individuals through things like anti-littering campaigns, and ensure that taxpayers and municipalities pay the tab for managing the waste. The lives harmed at every stephuman and nonhumandrop out of the equation.

The same consume-and-dispose violence threads through me also. It has benefited me my whole life. I grew up the daughter of a nuclear physicist in Los Alamos, the town that built the atomic bombs, which ended some lives in order to save others perceived to have more value. We are woven into the same netme, and bombs, and this car part.

For a decade, I followed threads that tie us together, through airplanes and sailors, the hydrogen bomb, Pacific islands, the Nazis, and Heidegger. I followed threads through silence, loss, and grief, through the birth of chemistry and the invention of radar, through patriarchy, empire, and chattel slavery. I followed threads through apologies and their failure, through a pandemic, and an uprising, and living lungs struggling to breathe, through old wounds and new ones, hurt reverberating, aching to be re-membered.