Heather Davis: Living in ‘petrotime’ and seeing plastics as grand-kin (ep377)
“What [the plastiglomerate] really highlights is the fact that plastic is now so incredibly ubiquitous that it can’t be taken out or removed. It is, in fact, a part of geology at this point in time.”
In this episode, we welcome Heather Davis, an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include what it could mean to view plastics and fossil fuels as a grand kin, how an understanding of the ‘plastiglomerate’ challenges the binary of the ‘natural’ and the ‘synthetic’, sitting with the troubling paradox of the prevalence of plastics causing harm to life while at the same time enabling the proliferation of other forms of life, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Rowan Rain
Episode-inspired artwork by Sophie Le Grelle
Episode references:
Plastic Matter, a book by Heather Davis
Plastic Media, an essay by Heather Davis
“Ecosystem of Excess”, an art project by Pinar Yoldas
“An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record”, an article by Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, a book by Doris Lessing
““Is Gender Necessary?” Redux”, an article by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance”, an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Heather Davis: My maternal grandfather was a chemical engineer and then later a manager for DuPont, for his entire working life. And as a part of that work, he was involved in the development of all kinds of petrotextiles, so different synthetic fibers, and also in the development of the plastic milk bag, which is used all over the world, not so much in the United States, but in Canada, in South America and India, and elsewhere. So plastic in some sense, was always a part of my life in this immediate way, in the stories of what it was like for him to participate in the development of this strange, mundane object that has proliferated around the world. But also, everybody who was born around when I was born or a little bit earlier, and then of course, definitely all the generations to come, we grew up in a world where plastic was really ubiquitous.
What I wanted to think through in the relationship to "inheritance" in particular, was how the word inheritance is a designation of a certain kind of property relation. So within the English language, when we speak of inheritance, generally the first connotation that comes to mind—of course, there's intellectual inheritances, or genetic inheritances or other ways as well, but one of the primary ways in which we use that word—is to really think about intergenerational transfers of wealth. And the reason why inheritance for me was so important in that context was both in thinking through what my grandfather's very stable, upper middle class life, was then able to transmit to mine.
So, like how my own middle-classness and the stability in that was a function, in part, of his job at DuPont, and also the ways in which plastic in some senses shores up a lot of these relations that work in the same manner as other property relations, so the ways in which intergenerational transfers of wealth often are used as mechanisms, or the way that they function, have been primarily to benefit folks like myself. [That is,] settlers of European heritage, white people in other words, and how that same relationship of inheritance is often not the same for other folks.
I was really interested in how that inheritance is manifested in an object like plastic, both in terms of my own immediate family story, but the ways in which plastic works to the benefit of some and the expense of others.
I felt that that description of inheritance drew attention to those qualities.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing this.
I want to read a quote from you to lay the grounds for our conversation on plastics here.
You share, "Emerging from technoscience and technoculture, plastic matter shares a particular dissatisfaction with the world as it is, or in being in the present, attuned to its multiple nuances and contradictions." How would you elaborate on or trouble this type of technocultural, "futuristic", new-making-of-the-world thinking, or a rush to move on without taking ownership or responsibility? And how has it informed or even shaped the creation of the material that is plastic, which has become deeply entangled in modernity today?
Heather Davis: I'll start with the second part of your question first, which is how has plastic contributed to this utopian, techno culture, technofuturism. There's lots of different ways in which one can approach this. And I think that the utopian aspects of it are very real. To me, they are really important. When you look back at the records of the molecular engineers who were involved in the creation of various plastics—I had the chance to go to the Hagley Archives and which are the official archives of DuPont, [at least] the archival materials that they want the public to see—I ran across a series of oral histories with various engineers who had worked on the development of different types of polymers that we would classify as plastics, and what was really apparent in that was that there was a genuine excitement.
People really believed that what they were doing was really making the world a better place. And there was a real excitement and commitment to that vision, even when there might be indications that things weren't going as planned. For example, there's a quote in the book that talks about one of the engineers who, going back to [where I believe] was Wilmington, where plastics were being developed, [during which] there was an overwhelming, powerful smell that was being emitted, because of the runoff from the industry, from the manufacturing of plastics. Everyone understood it to be the smell of success. So the ways in which we think of the smell of success as actually being the off-gassing of various pollutants might seem like an easily dismissed vision…
But I actually think that there was a real investment in a politic, and people genuinely had this vision of being able to create this better world.
And I know certainly when I talked to my grandfather when he was alive, he would say the same thing. He would talk about the kinds of chemical fertilizers, for example, that were also developed by DuPont and other companies, or pesticides, even including things like DDT—and he would defend those products as being products that really made the world a lot better. So I think that one of the investments in technofuturity is a genuine belief in the betterment of the world. So I think what we want to be careful about is the kinds of investments that are then happening. Not to say that any belief in the betterment of the world is wrong, or somehow misguided, but to really recognize what kinds of worlds are being built, and at whose expense.
And also the ways in which, of course, we've seen in the history of the 20th century in particular, a real intensification of some of the underlying tenets that get built into colonial logics, including and especially the logic of progress as always the means of betterment—we can never be satisfied with things as they are; that there has to be a growth model for everything; instead of reinvesting in methodologies of regeneration or cultivation or the circular economy, there's a real tendency towards this rush to futurity. I also think that this has deep roots in a longer colonial history that really is invested in that idea of progress and rush towards the future.
And one of the points that was really influential in my thinking about plastic, was a quote from Kyle Powys Whyte, who is a philosopher and a member of the Potawatomi Nation. He talks about how what we are currently living in is my ancestors' utopia and his ancestors' dystopia. I think that that is a very poignant way of looking at things, where we can look at the kinds of investments in techno-utopianism, the investments in this rush for progress, the investments in the removal of ourselves from what we may call nature, the dislocation and dissociation of ourselves from other people, but also from the other beings that also inhabit the world. All of these things are inherently a part of the relations that plastic is producing in the world.
I think it's really an extension of this type of logic that has been with us for at least the last 500 years since the start of colonialism. And so undoing these logics, of technofuturity or not wanting to actually sit with what has happened—part of that at this point is because people don't want to reckon with our histories.
There's a real fear, avoidance or reactivity that really comes up when we want to actually have conversations about what does it mean for somebody like me to be living in these lands, and to have an attachment to these lands that were fundamentally shaped through the projects of genocide and enslavement.
And the massive land and air and and waterway transformations that accompanied those, those two fundamental projects. So what does it mean to really address ourselves to those questions? That's something that is very difficult to do.
I think also technofuturity gets produced [in ways that are] somehow removed from those histories, even though all of the investments in techno-utopianism continue to reinvest in the same extractive logics that are inherently part of colonialism in the first place. If that sounds really heady, maybe just to give [a] concrete example: folks are getting super excited about electric vehicles, and of course, we need to move away from combustion engines, and in a place like the United States, we immediately confront the problems of the infrastructure of the roadways; but what becomes very apparent in rather than dealing with the infrastructures of the roadways and really thinking through why there [aren't] better mass transit systems, instead there's just a shift to electric vehicles, as if that will solve our problems.
But of course, we're already seeing the ways in which the same extractive projects that were, that are a part of the fossil fuel industry are now just shifting to rare earth minerals. So in the Atacama Desert in Chile, for example, or the Ring of Fire in Northern Ontario, these are places that are now in heavy contestation between drivers of industry and a desire for a better future, but at the same time are coming up against a lot of Indigenous resistance, because the idea of what that better future is, is very different for different people.
Kamea Chayne: I was going to ask you if you see this type of techno-solutionism stemming from techno culture showing up in the ways that people are rushing to address the climate crisis today, but you just answered that.
I do think it speaks to the importance of going beyond making substitutions, to digging deeper and shifting the underlying foundations. And I also think it's really perceptive, everything you said, in that there's this delicate reality that for the most part, I believe, those who do consider themselves techno-solutionists, have good intentions of genuinely wanting to improve the world and addressing our varied crises and improving people's life quality, and so forth. But of course, our understandings and visions of what advancement or improvement or betterment mean and what it will take, will differ drastically based on our differing worldviews, knowledges, experiences, our understandings of history and so on. So I think with this understanding, approaching these conversations with people, rather than with a fight mentality, holding empathy and an openness to engage, hopefully will lead to more productive understandings of our shared values and intentions and what we can do going forward to address the same crises that most people are worried about and do want to address.
A beautiful and perhaps uneasy question that guides your work is, what might it mean to take these enmeshments with objects like plastic that we may find repulsive and reject—not as what we must distance ourselves from; but instead, something we might grow to be closer and more intimate with?
I think especially when it comes to plastic pollution, there is an understandable desire to distance ourselves, to find plastics and the fossil fuels that they are made from to be dirty, unlovable, and disgusting, and degrade their presence in the world.
But, your invitation to see plastics and oil as grand-kin leads for me to this question instead of—what could it mean to not have a repulsive reaction to plastic and fossil fuels, but a sort of reverence and respect for what they quite literally are and can represent? On this note, could you talk more about this perspective shift that disturbs many of our presumed boundaries of our lives and how it might lead us to relate to the various fossil-fuel related crises today in different ways?
Heather Davis: I think that for me, this shift arose out of two different ways of thinking. The first being that a lot of the logics of plastic waste in terms of how it is currently dealt with in the world is precisely one where for those of us who live in countries with the infrastructure to be able to deal with plastic waste, we [then] often push that plastic waste to other countries to deal with. This is part of the logics of colonialism more broadly, where, for example, a lot of our plastic waste from the United States at the moment end up in places like Indonesia, where folks are forced to live with plastic waste, especially folks who are poor or who don't have access to the same class resources.
For me, this is a really untenable thing, that if we are benefiting from the use of plastic, then I think we also need to live with our own waste. And that for me, is a really fundamental ethic in thinking about how to deal with plastic pollution and its toxicity. This also extends into thinking about plastic production and where plastic production is concentrated. So plastic production is often concentrated in communities that are low-income or communities of color—in particular, Black and Indigenous communities, in the context of Canada and the United States.
If we're going to be benefiting from the use of these materials and if they are enhancing our lives, providing the means, for example, for us to be able to have this conversation over the Internet at the moment—which is delightful and super important—I think we also need to really deal with the consequences of that. The kind of pushing this away to somewhere else, is also a part of these same extractive and colonial logics that I was highlighting earlier.
In terms of shifting the focus to thinking about plastics and fossil fuels as a grand-kin, a lot of that thinking both grew out of my deep commitments to queer theory and to queer life and to thinking about how family formations and the formation of obligations and relations might be different than a heteronormative setup; I'm also really indebted to many Indigenous scholars, and in particular to Zoe Todd and Michelle Murphy, who are both Métis, and who both articulate this relationship to thinking through these relations, and also to the scholar Vanessa Agard-Jones, who is a Black Caribbean scholar living in the United States.
So really thinking about how relations might be troubled, and what would it mean to actually take up plastic as a grand-kin, this in part was spurred on by my reading of an article at the very beginning of the research that I was doing, [during which] I was also in conversation with the artist Pinar Yoldas, who made this beautiful project called an "Ecosystem of Excess". Both the article and her work are dealing with the fact that there is now this kind of plasticsphere. When the article first came out, I believe in 2013, there was a first knowledge of the fact that on these tiny pieces of plastic that were floating in the oceans, there was all of this microbial life. So communities of microbes that were living on these tiny pieces of plastic that were floating around.
And then the thought was, what happens if creatures evolve, as Yoldas proposed, to be able to process all of this plastic?
And what has actually happened in the world, as we've seen, is that there [are] more and more organisms that can, we think, digest the plastic. Now, there seems to be a lot of debate over whether this is being successfully digested or whether it's just passing through organisms' digestive tracks. But, in my house, I managed to go through an entire lifecycle of mealworms who were living off of a little bit of wheat bran and mostly Styrofoam. So I think they're probably getting something out of it, which is really incredible. And so I think that instead of running away in fear from something like that, there is an invitation then to ask after the kinds of evolutions that are being pushed, perhaps totally unintentionally.
And both of these things are in no way, shape or form, an argument for the vast proliferation of plastics that are happening or the kind of unimpeded expansion of the fossil fuel industry at large. I definitely would like to see both of those things radically curbed. But I do think that there is the question of, if we are going to be producing this, if we have produced these things, if we have benefited from them, then we need to be able to take responsibility for them. And I think that that shift in orientation is one that to me seems far more ethical than putting our waste or displacing the longer term processes of what it means to be living in a world so saturated with plastic.
But I also really wanted to push how we might think about plastics and fossil fuels, if we really took seriously that they were some kind of ancestor that had been on Earth without their permission. That brings up two questions immediately. One is, would we unearth our ancestors?
Would we unearth [our ancestors] in the ways that we've been doing, in this very crass way?
Maybe that's not the way to go about digging things up from the Earth. And maybe it leads to the question of whether we should be digging things up from the earth at all. But if we are going to be engaging in those processes, maybe that needs to be much more careful.
And then in terms of plastics, one of the other things that I read at the very beginning of my research on this book and by chance was [Briefing for a Descent Into Hell] by Doris Lessing. And in [this kind of post-apocalyptic] novel, she describes how plastic has become this incredible resource. And it really foreshadows some of the things that are currently occurring, which is the proposition to use garbage dumps as mines for the future, because there are so many resources in there, metal, oil in the form of plastic. There's all of this stuff that is actually available to us. But that also like what would happen if plastic because it was a grand-kin, became one of the most valuable materials on Earth? If we're going to still operate under those terms, what would its monetary value be? What would it mean if it was incredibly expensive, or if it was incredibly valued, if we really, really thought about what our relations to it should be and when we should be using it?
I think that those are the types of questions that I want to provoke in people, in addition to maybe some of the more philosophical questions, about what is our entanglement with, and what are our obligations to, the immediate beings that we share the world with?
Kamea Chayne: This also brings up the general idea that extraction tends to be easier and more cost-effective, more profitable than salvaging used and dumped materials. So it also leads me to consider how the profit motive, given our current economic system, is driving certain forms of extractive technologies and preventing certain forms of techno-solutionism from even being made or being prioritized. There's a lot more to think about here and learn from what you just shared.
And I want to come back to microbial life shortly, but something that you've done in your work is to trace the geological relations of plastic through what is called the plastiglomerate. And this was my first time hearing this term, and I would assume the same for a lot of our listeners as well, so I would love if you could expand on what this is and also how it relates to what you call petro-time.
Heather Davis: The plastiglomerate is a term that was used to describe this new, not exactly a rock, more like a rock-like substance. And the naming of this rock-like substance happened with three people. Charles Moore, who is a well-known plastic activist and captain of a ship, Patricia Corcoran, who is a geologist, and Kelly Jazvac, who is an artist. The three of them went to a particular beach, Kamilo Beach, in Hawai'i, where they knew that these plastiglomerate were rapidly proliferating across the beach, and they knew this because locals had known this for a very long time, and they'd seen it happening for a really long time. So they're certainly not the first people to notice this. But they were the first people to give it a name, and by way of doing so, bringing wider attention to this phenomenon.
Basically what's happening, is that, as people are probably aware, there's five gyres in the oceans, which just means a series of currents that push things around, and in particular kinds of ways and particular directions. And in particular, this one beach in Hawai'i happens to be situated in a way where it's close to the North Pacific Gyre, [and because the gyre moves that way,] everything in [that particular current] that was floating would just turn up eventually on this particular beach. So in the past, you'd have driftwood, if there were shipwrecks. Now the oceans are full of plastic, and as a result of this, there's a huge amount of plastic on Kamilo Beach.
I've never been there myself, but from the descriptions and from talking to Kelly and Patricia about their experiences there, it sounds like you're walking more into a garbage dump than on what you would imagine a beach [feels] like. A plastiglomerate is basically a rock-like thing, composed of melted plastic, and all kinds of other debris: rocks or sticks or other types of things. It forms into this thing that looks essentially like a rock. If you were to look at it from a distance, you might think it's a rock. And then there's also the same kind of phenomenon, but stuck in the rocks there where you can't actually remove it as an individual object. It's stuck in the landscape there. This really highlights the ways in which plastic has these incredibly long timeframes.
One of the things that really captured people's imaginations when they first heard about the plastiglomerate [was how]—it got a fair amount of press when it was first named, and one of the reasons I think is because—it really highlights the ways in which geology itself is now being composed in part through plastics. Many of us have a real repulsion to that news or it's difficult to accept. It feels like we should really be able to separate the natural from the synthetic, and that those kinds of things should not be existing in these pristine, beautiful beaches.
What it really highlights is the fact that plastic is now so incredibly ubiquitous that it can't be taken out or removed. It is, in fact, a part of geology at this point in time.
What that leads me to then consider is the timeframes of plastic. How do we think with the material that has such an unknown existence? Plastic, as a primarily petrochemical-based material, has only been around for just a little over 100 years. That's a very short period of time that it's existed for. When people say that the plastic can exist for 10,000 years or 100,000 years or whatever they say, it's either because people have done a lot of experiments in labs where they've put the material under all kinds of different stresses, to see whether and how it breaks down or, the other pathway is what we're already seeing—which is all of these organisms that can successfully digest plastics, make it turn back into its molecular component parts, basically turning it into something else altogether. But, of course, that happens at a much slower rate if it's a rock that is either glued to a surface, or rocks that are that are moving around in the world.
I think it really is a reminder to think about the deep time of plastic, the fact that the plastic emerges from this incredibly long history, the history of the production of fossil fuels in the first place, so all of the organisms, the plants and the mostly single-celled organisms, but a few multicellular beings, that went into the production of fossil fuels, whose bodies were squished in such a particular way that after hundreds of thousands of years, this is what happens. And then this very unknown future and the ways in which we interact with plastic—it's such a mundane material, and one that we interact with on a daily basis.
So I think it's really easy to lose sight of the radically colliding timescales of plastic and petro-time.
And for me, one of the other really startling things that, again, I learned through Michelle Murphy's work, was the ways in which plastic and other kinds of petrochemical toxins have this latent aspect to them. So if you are exposed to particular toxins, if you're somebody who has ovaries, for example, the effects of that exposure might not show up for two generations into the future. And that to me was really mind-boggling. So we really don't know the ways in which we are fundamentally altering our world. This is happening at these radical time scales that are in some ways very hard to fathom and are colliding in all different directions. So the concept of petro-time was trying to grapple with the geological aspect of plastic's deep time, and also in terms of thinking about the unknown ways in which plastic and its associated chemicals are affecting our bodies.
Kamea Chayne: As you mentioned, the idea of the plastiglomerate also troubles a neat distinction between the natural and the synthetic. And I want to pick this apart further, because the official definition of nature is basically all life other than humans and what humans create. And I know a lot of decolonial thinkers reject that sort of presumed separation between humans and the more-than-human world. I'm also aware that most Indigenous languages do not even have a word for nature—just the Earth, or the world.
And, implicit to rejecting the idea of nature or natural as being all that is not human, is this question of what synthetic even means, if it by definitely also cannot be considered natural. I know you've explored some of these themes as you share: "Plastic matter speaks to this paradoxical relation: the ways in which plastics are impressed with an attempt to violently cleave the world in two, while also exposing how nature and culture can never be separated."
How have you thought through your understanding of synthetic and natural, while at the same time recognizing that a perspective of embodiment and entanglement is part of what is necessary to healing our relationships with ourselves and the planet?
Heather Davis: That was a really difficult thing to think through, actually, and I feel like I'm still thinking through it. Because on the one hand, I think it is useful to be able to have the specific concepts that can do the work of showing where something that is derived from fossil fuels and objects, like plastic, might have a different type of relationship to the world around them than, say, a desk made of wood.
I use a quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who also points this out, where she's talking about giving thanks and thinking through the relations of various types of objects in her house and the things that she's using on a daily basis. And then she gets to something plastic and she doesn't know what to do with it. She's like, what do we give things to in this object? I think that is what the troubling thing about something like plastic is. So in the book, I try to develop this concept called synthetic universality. It's not that I want to say that there is a clear-cut division between the synthetic and the natural.
And I completely agree with anti-colonial, feminist, Indigenous scholars who have done so much work to really bring our attention to the ways in which this divide between nature and culture that was developed primarily through a Western imperialistic model, that that divide is both fundamentally false, I would say, risking an ontological claim about the world. But I think that we can really see the ways in which things move in and out of the body, whether we like it or not. And that the things that humans make are maybe on a different scale than many other creatures. But, we're still not at the scale of cyanobacteria, for example, as somebody like Lynn Margulis would remind us. Cyanobacteria fundamentally changed the atmosphere of the planet long before humans knew anything about or were affecting the climate on the planetary scale.
We're not the first species to do something like this.
And I think that those things are really good reminders [of] the ways in which we need to rethink that fundamental presupposition that nature and culture are separate especially because of the harm that is obviously caused to people and other beings. But at the same time, it was really necessary for me to be able to name what is it about a material like plastic—and I'm sure it's not the only one, but it's the one that I've been thinking with—that really invites a dissociation from the Earth? So the way that I was trying to think it through was through this fundamental process of alienation. One of the things that I say to people when trying to think this through is like, well, I'm going to buy local plastic from now on. It seems laughable, right?
That doesn't make sense. You're not like, oh, I'm going to go to the farmer's market and buy local plastic. What does that even mean? Like you have your own well in your backyard and you manufacture plastic there? Mostly it's a concept that makes absolutely no sense. And that's because of the ways in which the petrochemical industry has so many layers of capitalist alienation built into it, where we don't see where plastics come from and we don't understand where they come from, there is no relationship to their actual home. And so despite the fact that this isn't really the case once plastics start to break down—they become part of whatever ecosystem they're in and have very specific effects.
Similarly, we can't universalize to say that all of our interactions with plastics are the same because some of us live closer to the [plastic production] facilities, and some of us live further away. And depending on where you live, that's going to have really different effects on your overall health. But at the same time, I wanted to hold on to this quality of alienation, [and] really draw this out. And the ways in which I was thinking about that was through this phenomenon of universality. Plastic proposes itself almost to be universal, to be fundamentally not of the Earth, and to not situate ourselves in the Earth. It's very difficult to situate oneself in the Earth through plastic—I think that there's a certain intention behind that material that I think influences its material expression.
Kamea Chayne: I just love how this conversation really challenges a lot of what I had presumed to be the truth or close to it. And there are no right answers. I appreciate being able to think through these things with you.
There's a troubling paradox in regards to the impact of plastic pollution that I would love for us to go over. And that is the impact of plastics and the various chemicals used in its production on reproductive health and the fertility of various life forms, and simultaneously, the new forms of life that have arisen from the widespread presence of plastics, including the ones that now feed off of plastic and might even depend on it to live.
What do you think is important to share here? And as you ask, what happens if we do attempt to see the life within the object as potential queer kin?
Heather Davis: That's great. It's definitely a paradox that I have sat with for a really long time. For me, I think that's where politics comes in. That's why plastic is always, to me, a political material. And a lot of these material discussions are always political, because I think it's also okay to be in favor of certain worlds. If, climate change, for example, is producing new life forms. Ticks are doing really well in the Northeast where I live—deer ticks. And that's great news, if you're a deer tick, and it's less good news if you're a deer, or if you're a person who might get Lyme disease.
It's okay to say that you are on the side of certain worlds, and not on the side of others.
And then recognizing that that decision does actually mean the reduction of the lifeworld of deer ticks, for example. I think that making those political decisions is actually totally okay and in fact, really necessary. And one of the other things that has long been part of my thinking is a belief in ecological diversity. If we really fundamentally believe in ecological diversity as a good, if that is the political orientation that we want to take, then the proliferation of plastic, the proliferation of fossil fuels is not leading in that direction. It's leading to monocultures, to the squashing or the contamination of particular forms of life. But that doesn't mean that it's a complete reduction of all life forms.
There are actually all kinds of life forms that are thriving under the current kind of colonial capitalist conditions. And it's not that one has to come out against jellyfish or something. But I think that it's also okay to be in favor of more biodiversity. I think that there are ways in which we can build political communities around agreements, around both of those decisions, even at the same time withholding the knowledge that no matter what kinds of futures are going to exist, they're going to change, that the Earth has been through such vast changes in its history and will continue to go through incredibly vast changes, which have probably always included the either total morphing into a complete other species or the eradication of humans. And that's always been the case.
I think that that's fine to hold that.
But while we're here, I think that there is a question of who are we obligated to? Who do we have responsibilities to? And what kinds of worlds do we want to see proliferate?
Those ones, I think for me, are always political questions.
Kamea Chayne: Our podcast's description includes exploring our paths to collective healing as a north star. But I think this entire conversation ,including this idea of the constant reconfiguration of the Earth, also makes me wonder whether our understanding of collective health needs to constantly evolve as the make up of Earth's body continues to transform.
Like what should we even use as a measurement of our planetary health? Is it stability or even non-change, because a civilization stuck in its ways sees the troubles of climate change as an illness rather than a call to change? Is it the creation of new life? Is it the diversity of life forms? Is it the net and collective quality of life, even though inherent to life is this messy and un-pure reality that the birth and proliferation of new life always grow off of the taking and consumption of other beings? So, I have a lot more questions to sit with.
For now, though, one of the biggest takeaways for me especially from looking at the crisis and reality that is plastic pollution and plastic entanglement in modernity is that all that we've already inherited and all that we've ourselves co-created cannot simply be undone or canceled. And in fact maybe a desire to rush into hitting delete in order to exit cleanly would continue that pattern of having the urge to run away from the messiness of it all.
As you've been working with the challenging task of thinking with and through plastic, I wonder what you think this grand-kin might teach us, in terms of undoing the mess and recomposing our relations as parts of Earth?
Heather Davis: I think for me, it's funny, in the book, there's no real conclusion. There [are] just three different stories that I tell at the end. And that was in part because it was difficult for me to come up with a conclusion and in some ways even the possibility of thinking about plastic or oil as grand-kin, I don't necessarily mean that as redemptive, and I don't necessarily mean that there's this story of colonialism embedded into plastics, or story of techno-utopianism embedded into plastics, and then because it's birthing new organisms, this is somehow the redemptive part of plastics. It's not the story that I want to tell.
The story that I want to tell is I think maybe much closer to what you just described, which is a series of paradoxes that we're left with. Some of the lessons that come from those paradoxes, if we're willing to sit with them, is to have a deeper appreciation. One of the things that I really love about the scholarly traditions that I've had the privilege to be embedded in is the ways in which folks like Donna Haraway, for example, have really emphasized how what we think matters. And it matters in the sense [that] it is important, but also in the sense that it literally brings into being material worlds. With plastic, what I was trying to illustrate was in part that, and so I want us to be a bit more careful about what concepts, what ideas we're investing in, so that we can also produce material worlds that we feel comfortable and safe in, but, as you indicate, may be a little bit uncomfortable.
So I think that there's also a part of me that doesn't totally trust—maybe just because my background is a white, middle-class person, I'm always a little bit uncomfortable with too much comfort. It feels like something has probably gone wrong. It's maybe challenging in there but not like fundamentally harmful on a massive scale.
I think that part of living on the Earth is that we can't escape forms of harm. We're not going to be able to escape toxicity. We can't escape pathogens. All of these things are just part of the world that we live in. I think that that's actually perfectly okay. It's just that we don't want to be amplifying those systems.
And I think learning to be more careful about that, is what I really hope for.
Kamea Chayne: Well, in spite of all the problems and challenges that come from a world deeply entangled with plastics and plastic pollution, you note that "plastic, paradoxically, carries within it many earthly lessons that might be useful in navigating through the current ecological crisis."
As some concluding remarks for our main discussion, and in addition to the many lessons we've already talked through what else would you like to share in regards to how we might reframe or rethink the troubled times we're in, and what calls to action or deeper inquiry do you have for our listeners?
Heather Davis: I think that the real thing that has underlined the motivations for the book has really been about our practice to materiality in general. So I took plastic as the example for this book, but I think that it would be interesting to do similar analyses of different types of materials that we interact with on a daily basis. [There are] lots of artists and scholars and activists who are doing that work all the time. And I think that that's really interesting and necessary work, to really rethink our relations to materiality.
[As to calls to action,] I'm always a huge supporter of any kind of extended producer responsibility bills that anybody is trying to put forward. Maybe not all of them, but the ones that really have some teeth in them; those are really important in terms of rethinking who is paying for the costs of plastic pollution—so that's the companies who are producing the plastics in the first place. And it helps to work against the profit motive that you were bringing up earlier.
[Also I would highlight] support for keep it in the ground campaigns or pipeline blockades or these kinds of things. I think we really need to much more radically shift away from fossil fuels.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Heather Davis: So it's not a book, but it is an article, which is Ursula K. Le Guin's “‘Is Gender Necessary?’ Redux”, which is a kind of maybe strange thing to bring into this conversation. But one of the things I really love about that article is that she argues with herself, so she changes her mind twice in the article, one where she like literally puts in quotes and highlights the places where she disagrees with herself. And I think that that kind of an ethic in public, going back to something that you've written or published and rewriting it, is such an important way of being in the world, like the ability to say I was wrong, and I actually would do it this way.
The other one that really pops into my head is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance”, because it's just such a beautiful provocation for thinking through the ways in which the models of scarcity and abundance are so deeply ingrained in us, and how to offer a different understanding of our relations to the world.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Heather Davis: I love hiking and camping, and all those things. It really helps me stay grounded. But a quicker motto is to really try to remember to practice gratitude for everything that I have, and to do that practice of trying to remember where things come from, and who made them, and who brought them to me, and all the kind of work and labor from both humans, and other-than-human beings that go into those things.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Heather Davis: So I think in academic circles, the rise of Black ecologies, and the conversations between Black and Indigenous studies, have been incredibly important. If we're really thinking through the structures of settler colonialism, then the integration of those two fields is how we're going to get to something else. And also the rise of awareness of climate colonialism, the fact that this is now something that multiple people talk about. It's a much more general phenomenon to understand the connections between colonialism and imperialism, white supremacy and climate change.
Kamea Chayne: Heather, what a really thought-provoking conversation for me here. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. For now, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Heather Davis: I just really thank you for your incredibly thoughtful questions and really beautiful elaborations of and engagement with these really difficult paradoxical situations that we find ourselves in. I know it's not always easy to sit in that space of uncomfortableness, but I think it really is the best way through. So cultivating practices that allow us to do that, I think are really so helpful. So I really thank you so much.
