Hard to see it as anything short of evil. It feels as though I’m witnessing what will be the eventual death of Earth, or maybe just humanity. A big, armored case I have, for some electronic equipment, has been padded inside by what’s now 40-year-old foam rubber plastic that used to be solid foam. But it is decaying, dissolving. It’s horrible stuff.
A handful of it is at first like angel food cake, but crumbles, more dissolves, in my hands. A fleck of it on the floor creates a smudge that must be scrubbed off, both floor and feet. I scrape up the cake and put it in a bag, but it’s avoiding being collected, spreading everywhere.
So, I should mention I’ve written a song. It’s the result of a year of research gathering articles and studies about plastic, and how it’s killing us. Drawn from my imagination putting words together, this pollution I’m rattling on about was somehow just abstract images, in other places. But now here it is, exactly what I’ve been talking about manifested, staring me in the face.
I take the project to the back porch and fully scrape and then scrub and then wash it out with the garden hose; I’ve totally corrupted a couple of scrubber sponges (also plastic) and thrown them away already (Away?).
I bought a plastic sheet at the hardware store to put under all this, making sure I don’t step on any that falls. I will roll up the sheet and put it in the trash, with ceremonial mourning for the landfill. Do I dump this soup in the back yard? The grass has never seen anything like this. But that’s what we do, here, while in plenty of other places, nature is enduring much worse contamination. In poorer countries, from South America to the South Pacific and Africa, young mountains of decaying plastic are growing, poisoning all earthly elements, and the children who pick them over. And who will deal with it, heal this evil occupation?
This is not temporary, transient, this is forever. I know - entropy - everything does break down, dissipates; but “everything” used to be Earth elements going back to rest in the great cycle of life. This is a whole new thing, it breaks down - into microplastics and nanoplastics, even smaller - and it’s everywhere. Plastic is in the water, the air, and in our bodies. But this is something different, alien, it never will go back to the Earth. So, I’m witnessing it now firsthand. Solid to liquid, and I smell it, so it’s in the air. This is not theoretical, here it is. This is haunting my dreams at night.
I’ve become a fan of a scientist, Judith Enck. She and her doctoral students at Bennington College are studying plastic and endocrinology, how plastic is poisoning us. It’s discouraging news. There’s been study before, though I don’t think we have paid enough attention. The pace of this alien invasion has accelerated; the amounts of plastic are so staggering we must respond. I didn’t imagine though, until recently, that we’d be going up against the US Government, new policies, usurping, overthrowing, changing laws we worked so hard to put in place. Enough to make you want to quit and just look for a place to hide. Not possible. So, let me distract you with this story.
There’s a small lake outside of Toronto that is very deep, Crawford Lake, you might have heard of it. It has become one prime focus of the study of Stratigraphy, reconstructing history from the sediments that fall to the bottom of this serene body of water. Scientists can trace back centuries - 1,000 years of the Holocene dependable temperatures that supported human settlements, agriculture. But in the last couple of centuries, we go from indigenous neighbors leaving evidence of crop pollen and traces of trees to fly ash from the early European factories and other new toxic elements.
In recent years we can see that elm trees disappeared, from an epidemic of beetles. But it’s in the 1950’s a huge change is obvious. Radioactivity shows up, fly ash increases 8-fold from factories hundreds of miles away in the Midwest, acid rain changes the PH of the water. Scientists call these momentous changes “golden spikes,” after the celebrations of connected railroads across the continent – everything changed after that point.
But then we see that humans responded positively and did some conscious things. We outlawed atmospheric nuclear testing, and the radioactivity dropped. We banned lead in gasoline and the lead content dropped. We banned chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, that caused the hole in the ozone layer. We have at least sometimes acted mercifully toward the Earth and taken care of human life – a little.
Now the amount of plastic, and other petroleum toxic things, have just exploded in the current mix. This is our story we leave behind.
Writing a song seems like my first step in the healing. I tried to tell that story in this song. It starts with history: in the beginning of the 20th century - what a great discovery, plastics! - they brought us wonderful things that changed civilization. But then it all takes a turn.
I’ve been a little afraid to get this song together, and to sing it; I procrastinated a bit. Will it make us just more discouraged? Make the audience run out screaming. Do I really want to do that? I have sung it in public now (3 times) - and I’ve discovered – it’s just a song. It’s not pepper spray, or firehoses.
I didn’t want to make monster movie music, it’s at one point ominous maybe, but another point beautiful, I hope. The chord progression is as challenging as anything I’ve produced - but, it’s a song - so, I’m relieved, and I’m growing into it. I wrote a lot more words in the process, I usually do, and then cut and cut. I have focused it down to AAB-AAB-A form, so. not that unlike many songs. It feels like it would make it too much a pop song to repeat the B, the chorus, again. I think twice is enough. So, it ends with a verse, leaving us, on purpose, a little unresolved there, with a warning.
Plasticene
From the fossil record, first a fuel, then a saving grace
Bakelite, celluloid, and polyethylene.
Cellophane, Nylon, Kevlar, Tupperware,
Forging hospitals sterile and kitchens so clean.
Savior of life, deliverer of wonders.
Banished, the virus and bacteria, fungus or mildew.
Oh humanity, study the face of your saving grace
Your Messiah has come to kill you.
Age of the Plasticene - we’re living in the Plastisphere -
Micro to nanoparticles, unseen by the human eye,
Threatening the spirit of every miracle that lives,
Here on our fragile planet, traversing endless sky.
Flowing with the ocean, windborne through the air,
Marauding the biomes of life with no fear,
Sinking through human skin, baked into new rock,
Transporting invaders to new frontiers.
Lurking in the bloodstream, the placenta, the human heart
In a mother’s milk, the brain emerging in the womb
For all our hereafter, traces of this fossil record
Will be found in our tomb.
Age of the Plasticene - we’re living in the Plastisphere -
Micro to nanoparticles, unseen by the human eye,
Threatening the spirit of every miracle that lives,
Here on our fragile planet, traversing endless sky.
Mother bird feeds her chicks plastics ’til their bellies are filled.
So have we all become plastivores.
Nature absorbs our worst mistakes, but never so tested
By the hormone disruptor of life forevermore.
Jim Scott 8.10.24 revised 1.10.25
