Earth to Earth: Thoughts About Plastics

A reader reads, and reads, and reads, ponders, daydreams, and pretty soon, or in a while, or directly as my grandfather would have said - by which he meant pretty soon - the reader comes to find she has something to write down. There was nothing direct about her process though. The ideas she finds herself writing have only been channeled into her pen via long, far-ranging travels through histories and civilizations that she may know next to nothing about, may never have personally experienced.

So it is that a lot of my time is spent wandering around locally while thinking about matters in other lands. Not long ago I found a tennis ball in the act of returning itself to the earth, or, surprised the earth in the act of reclaiming the tennis ball. It's a two-way street, and a question of which has more agency, the plastic or the soil. They're both products of our earth with a capital E, and that Earth, to paraphrase Wendell Berry, is not just an inspiration. It is also a responsibility. I take it seriously.

Back years ago, I used to wonder what would become of all those bottles of White Rain shampoo that were no longer glass that shattered on the shower floor, but newly made of plastic that - mirabile dictu -would not cut your bare feet. Even then I knew that sooner or later we would run out of places to put all that plastic. And that's exactly what's transpired, but the situation is not so simple as to say that recycling is the answer. A recent article in Orion magazine lays out the magnitude of the problem and the cleverness of plastic as it seeks to return to its source. "As plastics degrade, so do the barriers that once seemed defined and distinct, between inert and organic, between outside a body and its interior, between science and art, between present and future. Even between what is living and what is not."