For the wild_071322

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Max Liboiron, originally aired in January of 2020.

Today, over 310 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year, accounting for around 8 percent of the world’s annual oil production. The ubiquity of plastic cannot be ignored as it has become an inextricable part of our living systems, circulating and making home within our bodies, packaged foods, urban environments, marine life, and waterways. We are living in and among “The Plastisphere,” the name given to these industrial-natural ecosystems and materially knotted worlds from the micro to the macro. 

Acknowledging our entangled relationship with plastics calls for a more nuanced discussion on waste through the prisms of colonialism, disposability, and knowledge production. What does the history of plastic production and the sanitation movement tell us about the design of modern waste regimes? How can we bring accountability into the scientific study of plastic and honor ecological relationality in the lab? How does the landscape of pollution—and attendant clean-up “solutions”—reproduce colonial dynamics?