Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care

By Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520393653

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of multiple books, including Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. She is a founding codirector of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change.

Book preview

Beyond Straw Men

ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION, POWER, AND CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Phaedra C. Pezzullo, University of Colorado Boulder

Salma Monani, Gettysburg College

EDITORIAL BOARD, ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Robert J. Brulle, Drexel University

Giovanna DiChiro, Swarthmore College

Xinghua Li, Babson College

D. Soyini Madison, Northwestern University

Curtis Marez, University of California San Diego

LeiLani Nishime, University of Washington

David N. Pellow, University of California Santa Barbara

Tarla Rai Peterson, University of Texas El Paso

1. Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico, by Catalina M. de Onís

2. On Black Media Philosophy, by Armond R. Towns

3. Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West, by E Cram

4. Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care, by Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Beyond Straw Men

Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pezzullo, Phaedra C., author.

Title: Beyond straw men : plastic pollution and networked cultures of care / Phaedra C. Pezzullo.

Other titles: Environmental communication, power, and culture ; 4.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Series: Environmental communication, power, and culture ; 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023005939 (print) | LCCN 2023005940 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520393639 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520393646 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520393653 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Plastic scrap—Environmental aspects. | Plastic scrap—Political aspects. | Plastics—Environmental aspects. | Plastics—Political aspects. | Internet and activism. | Social media.

Classification: LCC TD798 .P44 2023 (print) | LCC TD798 (ebook) | DDC 363.72/88—dc23/eng/20230302

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005939

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005940

Manufactured in the United States of America

32  31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For all of us—the whales, the trees, and the bees, including you and me

All proceeds of Beyond Straw Men go to Eco-Rethink (Nakuru, Kenya) and Justice for Formosa Victims (Point Comfort, Texas, United States)

Additional podcasts and links for educators and advocates are available at: https://phaedracpezzullo.com/beyond-strawmen

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Care amid Oceans of Trouble

1. #ThereIsNoAway: Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Life/Death Cycle of Plastics

2. Have a Coke and a #FootprintCalculator: The Myth of Recycling and Transnational Greenwashing

3. From #BanPlasticsKE to #ISupportBanPlasticsKE: Pissed Off Online, Picturing Participation, and Policing Pollution in Kenya

4. Engaging #StrawlessInSeattle and #StopSucking: The Loneliest Whale, Sporting Fun, and American Exceptionalism

5. #SuckItAbleism Intervenes: Eco-normative Shaming, Voicing Justice, and Planetary Fatalism

6. Creating #ToiChonCa (#IChooseFish): Trauma, Affective Art, and Big Tech Dominance

Conclusion: #BreakFree(FromPlastics)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was written during a global pandemic with a world on fire. While researching and writing, I lost kin to illness and suicide, as well as community in a mass shooting at my neighborhood grocery store. My home was evacuated due to wildfire risk. I transitioned to working online with an elementary-aged child learning remotely. My child contracted (though survived) COVID before vaccines were available. Then I moved my aging and ailing parents across country into my neighborhood. Both of my parents required visits to the emergency ward in the first week. At least three times I left my mother’s bedside to interview someone and return. My mother died while I slept on the floor next to her. From all these experiences and more, I do not take for granted being alive, let alone writing a book again. Surviving such tumultuous times and creating books is made possible only through the labor and the love of many, whom I acknowledge here, even as these words do not do their significance justice.

I am indebted to the people who talked with me on the podcast Communicating Care before it had an RSS feed: H.E. Prof. Judi Wakhungu, James Wakibia, Emy Kane, Dr. Shahriar Hossain, Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish, Nancy Bui, José Toscano Bravo, and Joe Andenmatten. At the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), Mia Ives-Rublee’s podcast was recorded live, cosponsored by the Dean’s Fund in the College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) and the Department of Environmental Studies, with publicity support from Disability Services and Ethnic Studies. This book wouldn’t be half of what it has become without those conversations. Consent to interviews doesn’t mean those interviewed agree with everything I’ve written. My hope, however, is that their lessons are palpable. As I consider each podcast a master class from people who continue to do the work to make the world a better place despite the odds, I recommend listening to the longer conversations at https://communicatingcare.buzzsprout.com.

Part of the gift of teaching is that I constantly meet new people from whom I learn. Over the years, my undergraduate students have convinced me to take ocean conservation, digital activism, and plastic pollution more seriously. Likewise, former and current graduate students have provided generative conversations about care, climate, colonialism, disability justice, hashtag activism, incarceration, nonhuman kin, oppression, waste, and water, particularly Lindsey Badger, Ali Branscombe, Warren Cook, E Cram, Catalina de Onís, Jake Dionne, Suz Enck, Logan Rae Gomez, Constance Gordon, Jeremy Gordon, Joe Hatfield, Amani Husain, Yesim Kaptan, Martin Law, Katie Lind, Myles Mason, Cole McGuffey, Norma Musih, Jo Marras Tate, Hunter Thompson, Mikayla Torres, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Rachel Vaughn, Isaac West, Bri Wiens, and Kelly Wilz. Gratitude also to Tim Schütz, who has become a rejuvenating interlocutor about the Formosa Plastics Global Archive at the University of California Irvine, research ethics, and digital media.

While finishing the initial manuscript, I enrolled as a student in a six-week online Bennington College class titled Beyond Plastics, which was taught by the former regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration, founder and president of the NGO Beyond Plastic, Professor Judith Enck. This experience allowed me to learn from her as well as participate in an extended online intergenerational exchange of over one hundred students. In addition to her content expertise, Enck provides a wonderful model of pedagogical generosity, calling in new waves of advocates and embodying a joyful mix of humor with intersectional awareness and pragmatic political advice. Plastic studies researchers and advocates more broadly continue to teach and inspire me on social media.

My mentors keep retiring but have checked in and taught me over the years. A humble and passionate environmental advocate and mentor, Robbie Cox continues to be generous as a textbook coauthor; his partner, Julia T. Wood, shares honest and insightful interpersonal advice. D. Soyini Madison and Lawrence Grossberg still shape my worldview. Since I moved to Boulder, Jerry Hauser has provided deeply grounding and insightful counsel on professional life and the good life.

Writing should not happen in isolation, even in a time profoundly impacted by quarantines, social distancing, and other labor intensities. Some incredibly smart colleagues whom I also consider trusted friends read early chapter drafts: Jeffrey A. Bennett, Kundai Chirindo, E Cram, Salma Monani, Vincent Pham, and Isaac West. Most generously, Constance Gordon read the entire manuscript early on; Jerry Hauser and Ted Striphas did as well toward the end. Colleagues also shared research: Amanda Carrico on behavior change, Casey Fiesler on digital media ethics, and Patrick Chandler on the US plastic pollution movement. My thinking benefits from episodic conversations with Angela J. Aguayo, Kelly Happe, Stephen J. Hartnett, Gregory J. Seigworth, Anjali Vats, and many more. All errors remain mine, though I am profoundly grateful for the counsel offered, particularly as I was juggling most of this project during a stressful period of care work in hospitals and hospice.

Despite ongoing and acute crises, Boulder is home to an exceptional community of climate research experts. Of late, I particularly have been bolstered by collaborative climate justice scholarship, teaching, and/or service with Karen Bailey, Max Boykoff, Cassandra Brooks, Amanda Carrico, Clint Carroll, Dave Ciplet, Shideh Dashti, Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish, Donna Goldstein, Jill Harrison, Abbie B. Liel, Marianne Moulton, Shelly L. Miller, Dave Newport, Beth Osnes, David Paradis, Shawhin Roudbari, Becca Safran, Manuela Sifuentes, Leah Sprain, Burton St. John, Leaf Van Boven, and Emily Yeh.

My department chair, Tim Kuhn, and my dean, Lori Bergen, have supported my climate leadership on campus. Tim has been a particularly gracious mentor during extraordinary circumstances. CMCI colleagues made memorial donations and shared food, including Karen Ashcraft, Jed Brubaker, Nabil Echchaibi, Steven Frost, Pete Simonson, Jamie Skerski, and Leah. Since they moved away, I miss hanging out more frequently with Tiara R. Na’puti and Lisa A. Flores. Omedi Ochieng has become a welcome interlocutor; he organized a gathering to discuss the introduction, including our colleagues: Leah, Pete, Laurie Gries, Danielle Hodge, and Amber Kelsie.

At the Pulitzer Center’s 2022 conference in Washington, D.C., I presented research on climate, labor, and plastics; gratitude to Flora Pereira, Christine Spolar, and Jon Sawyer for their warm support. A version of chapter 4 was presented at Ocean First, and I thank the marketing coordinator, Ingrid Hilbink, a former undergraduate student who has helped inspire me to think more about marine life and digital communication. I presented an earlier version of chapter 3 to the Department of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder, and I am appreciative of their encouragement, especially Emily Beam, Amanda, Cassandra, and Max. From the CU Boulder’s Digital Accessibility Office, Laura Hamrick and Allyson Bartley provided training for me, which I found helpful when writing Alt-text for the ebook version of this book.

Grants and funding for the podcast and book include The Waterhouse Family Institute, de Castro Research Award, the CU Boulder Office of Faculty Affairs, Inside the Greenhouse (thanks to Becca, Beth, and Max), and the Department of Communication at CU Boulder. With these funds, financial management (including Laura Burfield, Monica Carroll, Emilia Gaeta, Deborah Schaftlein, and Dawn Williams), and the support of Max as a fellow in CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences), I compensated talented artists and student workers: Anthony Albidrez, Robert Lino, and Bailey Troutman edited the podcast, and Michael Warren Cook drafted an initial bibliography.

My acquisition editors, Stacy Eisenstark and Chloe Layman, have been unwavering in their support, offering insightful perspectives, commiserating with me about the chaos in the world, and helping me realize my aspiration of becoming a University of California (UC) Press author. The series would not exist without Kim Robinson and Lyn Uhl. Our book series advisory board, including my coeditor, is comprised of many of my favorite scholars—I am grateful for their aptitudes and honored by their support, as well as the UC Press editorial board and two anonymous reviewers. As the hidden abode of books remains complicated, Chad Attenborough and Naja Pulliam Collins thankfully kept track of all the details. Gratitude to my copyeditor, Sharon Langworthy; my indexer, Cathy Hannabach of Ideas on Fire; and the whole UC Press production team for their keen labor.

I benefited from previously unmentioned long-distance gestures from many more people, including but not limited to Balthrop and Carole, Billie and Bryan, Christina, Chuck, Heather, Justin, Krista, Lisa K., Melissa, Michael and Regina, Nina and Dana, Stacy, Stephanie and Kevin, and Sue. Kundai, Carlos, and Emma graciously accommodated me as NCA ECD officers. Nearby, Becca and Sam, Renée, Tracy and Dave, and Val and Noah provided necessary support, from coordinating wildfire evacuations and fallen fences to sharing food and grief. Gratitude to the workout women for our network of care throughout the pandemic and a neighborhood mass shooting: Corinna, Donna, Ellie, Jamy, Kat, Kathy, Kelly, Kim, Pam, and Robyn. Catalina, Constance, and E particularly have kept me afloat with thoughtfulness, notifications, and humor. They, along with Isaac, Jeff, Natalie, Suz, and Tiara, generously fed me and my family from afar. Armond, Catalina, Constance, E, Isaac, Kelly, Myles, Natalie, Suz, and Warren helped me feel less adrift by nominating me for the inaugural Daniel C. Brouwer Mentorship Award.

Thanks to my brother Alexis, my fabulous cousins, and the rest of my extended family (through blood, marriage, and friendship) for loving me through it all, despite the miles between us and all the losses we’ve survived. My parents, Vincent and Carmen, long tolerated, fought, and shared my environmental and social justice values: loving them and being loved in return despite our disagreements probably was my first lesson in impure politics. Both were public school educators, and my dad maintains a bookshelf dedicated to my publications as he is writing the next chapter of his life.

My partner, Ted, has witnessed all of it—my professional heartbreaks and achievements, familial joys and losses, health complications and nourishing meals, mundane juggling acts and unforeseen traumas, and the dozen other book ideas I proposed on our road trips but didn’t write over the past decade. Staying together despite our differences and being able to make you laugh with all that is going on professionally and personally feels like a miracle. Thank you for stepping up and still caring.

Niko, my clever, humorous, kind, and creative bambino—who designed the Communicating Care podcast cover art—and our four-legged family members (Phoenix, Rogue, and Yoda) remind me to embrace joy, movement, and rest. Niko, I never knew I could love another as I love you.

Preface

For decades I have tried to avoid plastics. I take cloth bags to the grocery store, make my daily coffee with a reusable filter, use bamboo toothbrushes, and carry a metal water bottle. But I had not really thought those choices rose to the level of crisis I usually write about. They matter, but as someone who has published about toxic pollution, environmental racism, and climate injustices for decades, avoiding plastics has felt like a privilege I could afford.

And I haven’t always avoided plastics. Daily, I write with plastic pens, type on a plastic keyboard, and read with plastic contact lenses. Weekly, I buy fruits and vegetables in plastics. When I travel, using hotel toiletries in single-use plastic has felt like part of the vacation. As the pandemic spread, my cloth masks gave way to N95s, while plastic COVID tests have been taken regularly. When my mom was dying as I was writing this book, I didn’t look for cloth diapers or prescription drugs that weren’t in plastic bottles, let alone question the IV tubes in her arms or oral care sponge sticks I used in her mouth. Plastics: they haven’t felt important enough and yet somehow felt too essential to elude.

The drama on social media about plastics also has felt exhausting, including quick judgments, dismissive comments, and mocking crowds. As I discussed them with students, friends, and colleagues, plastic-related hashtag activism and reactions to it fascinated me, but with all the crises in the world, I wasn’t sure—and I’m honestly still not—that I have thick enough skin to seek out engaging that public intensity on purpose.

As I began this project, then, I remained on the fence about whether this was a worthy topic and if I was worthy of writing it—until a stranger tagged me on social media to publicize a virtual event, which was amplifying global grassroots efforts to resist a multinational plastics corporation (Formosa Plastics). He found me because he had read my first book, Toxic Tourism which included activists I admired who long have been disproportionately impacted by toxic pollution, living and dying with the burden of what it means to be imagined by dominant culture as disposable. The same industries creating toxic petrochemicals in their backyards, they reminded me, have been making and selling plastics. Hesitating to participate publicly in social dramas about plastics, I finally recognized, was my privilege—and one I needed to interrogate: What was holding me back? The answer, I soon realized, was: a lot.

This book has stretched me. I created a podcast to interview people profoundly shaped by where they live as well as to engage visuals circulating in global digital media beyond the locations where they were created. I also have analyzed English-language Global North digital media and tried to account for multilingual trends generated by the Global South. Writing has moved me to reflect on my human existence in a landlocked state as well as marine life communication through oceans and seas, to listen to voices harmed by plastic pollution as well as disability critiques of harmful environmental discourses, and to revisit my own positionalities as well as changing global relations. And much more.

I’m pretty sure I’m still too undone by the events of the past few years to be confident about anything. And yet as I listened, read, reflected on, and began to have more conversations about plastics online and offline, I remembered the anti–toxic pollution adage: there is no safe place. The least, then, I—and maybe any of us—can do is not give up. This book is my attempt to do just that, to once again step into the fray and risk admitting that I care, knowing I’m still unsteady.

Introduction

Care amid Oceans of Trouble

am always pissed off when somebody tells me that we cant do anything about BAD plastic bags #BanPlasticKE

—JAMES WAKIBIA, PHOTOJOURNALIST AND ACTIVIST (@JAMESWAKIBIA)

last night a guy in a turtle costume grabbed the straw out of my drink, threw it on the floor, and said ‘that’s for my homies’ #Halloween #StopSucking

—LONELY WHALE, NGO (@LONELYWHALE)

Festering outrage #Formosa’s #pollution in #Vietnam becomes a tipping point

—INTERNATIONAL POLLUTANTS ELIMINATION NETWORK, NGO (@TOXICSFREE)

Over the past decade, addressing plastic pollution has felt complicated and overwhelming. Anger, shame, hurt, fear, guilt, and despair abound online and offline. Like the planet, the reactions are increasingly heated. Such intensity is a sign something matters.

The most common observation of plastics is their ubiquity. Susan Freinkel opens Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by sharing how she tried not to touch plastic for a day and quickly failed; instead, she shifted to writing down everything she touched in a day that was plastic, from toilet seats and glasses to food containers and computers.¹ Bridging private and public practices, plastics have become integral to what Lauren Berlant more recently called the intimate public sphere.² In other words, our uses of plastics may feel deeply personal—from objects we place in our mouths daily to those others may use to assist us in our most precarious moments—and yet are structured by and structure our collective lives.

And plastic production keeps multiplying globally at remarkable rates since the mid-twentieth century. In 1950 the industry created approximately 2 million metric tons of plastics. That number rose to 380 million metric tons in 2015.³ That’s an almost 19,000 percent increase in less than a century. If we don’t change course, the World Economic Forum projects, current amounts will more than triple by 2050, resulting in what some alarmingly estimate as a 1:1 ratio of plastics to fish in the ocean by weight.⁴

Further, plastics aren’t inert. Stacy Alaimo contends we now can judge that a study on plastic pollution published in 1973 seems ancient when it called the harm ‘chiefly aesthetic.’ ⁵ As the Just Transition Alliance emphasizes, plastics are toxic to public health and broader ecosystems not just as waste but also as petrochemicals throughout their life cycle, including extraction, production, transportation, consumption, and disposal.⁶ Our lives are entangled with microplastics, as scientists have detected them in our blood, lungs, and breast milk.⁷ On average, people digest about a credit card’s worth of microplastics by weight per week.⁸ We all are becoming more plastic, even if we haven’t fully grasped what that transformation entails.

Unfortunately, recycling won’t make plastic pollution disappear. It is estimated that of all the plastic waste generated to date, only 9 percent has ever been recycled.⁹ Further, as Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law have documented: None of the commonly used plastics are biodegradable. As a result, they accumulate.¹⁰

Plastics, made mostly from fossil fuels, also exacerbate the unfolding climate emergency.¹¹ Xia Zhu writes: Plastic is carbon. More specially, almost all plastic is fossil carbon locked up in polymer form.¹² Considering the magnitude of production, Judith Enck emphasizes: If plastic were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter, beating out all but China, the U.S., India, and Russia.¹³ Estimated to encompass 20 percent of global oil consumption by 2050, multinational corporate producers are looking to plastics to compensate for a decreased demand for oil, gas, and coal as the world transitions away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.¹⁴ Greenpeace coexecutive director Annie Leonard stresses: For the oil and gas industry, plastic is their lifeline.¹⁵ Meanwhile Earth’s climate already has begun to wobble or flicker, as we head toward more tipping points, or critical transitions.¹⁶

Despite warning signs, this profound proliferation suggests that most of us have embraced plastics—or at least until recently. So who has begun to share pissed off reactions of outrage about plastics—and why now?

Beyond Straw Men takes hashtag activism seriously by staying with the trouble of and beyond the initial hot takes, to try to dwell in and unravel what is being negotiated in the name of plastics.¹⁷ The title is more than a feminist pun on plastic straws and men who promote them.¹⁸ Beyond Straw Men attempts to engage plastics-related hashtag activism in ways that don’t fall for or recreate straw man fallacies, which set up an imagined opposition for the purpose of showing how easily it can be torn down. My research complicates discourses that conjure false choices through straw man arguments, such as individual or systemic change (spoiler alert: we need both); whether one country is to blame or all; whether environmental advocacy is helpful or harmful; and yes, whether we should stand for or against all plastics. Advocates against plastic pollution consistently accept and even celebrate what I describe as impure politics, a contingent array of tactics addressing a complexity of challenges in imperfect yet impactful ways both online and offline.

I came to this understanding by deliberately listening not only to voices where I live in the United States, a country that bears profound responsibility for plastics, but also to advocates in the Global South.¹⁹ Contemporary calls for regulating plastics have not merely served as a distraction led by white, elite environmentalists, despite how they often are portrayed in the United States and the United Kingdom.²⁰ We are all impacted by—and contribute to—contemporary environmental crises, but not all equally.²¹ Addressing global injustices, Raka Shome insists, calls for more research to theorize through experiences that emerge from the Global South and keep them at the center of our intellectual and political imagination.²² Environmental communication from the Global South, Jagadish Thaker emphasizes, highlights that environmentalism is not just a value reserved for the postmaterialist rich but embedded in everyday struggles of poor communities against land and resource grab by the government and corporations.²³ Beyond Straw Men therefore engages voices of the Global South as a way of learning theory, ethics, and politics from, as Mohan J. Dutta and Mahuya Pal describe, space constituted geographically and communicatively amidst inequalities in the distribution of power.²⁴

To clarify, Global South often refers geographically to countries primarily located in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, despite crossing the equator. Angela Okune argues for Souths to underscore the plurality of worlds often obfuscated in dominant discourse.²⁵ My approach follows David Naguib Pellow’s lead in critical environmental justice studies to include communities of color and poor communities in industrialized nations within the ‘South’ designation (. . . ‘the South of the North’) and privileged communities in poor nations within the ‘North’ designation (or the ‘North of the South’).²⁶ The South of the North includes communities in the US Gulf Coast (sometimes called the Gulf South); in contrast, Australia generally is considered part of the Global North (excluding, however, Aboriginal peoples). I invoke Global South and Global North not to deny or oversimplify these heterogeneities but to reference profoundly uneven historical and ongoing hegemonic global power relations.²⁷ As D. Soyini Madison observes in her study of water and human rights in Ghana, global neoliberal policies have increased poverty and broadened economic equalities across the world.²⁸ Although Global South/North labels shift and are limited, these distinctions remain a pragmatic shorthand.²⁹

Beyond Straw Men engages environmental leadership of the Global South and the Global South of the North, to deliberately reflect anti-colonial, deimperialist critiques of plastic pollution as a methodological praxis of reorienting.³⁰ I write across intersectional identities to resist the flattening of global privileges and oppressions, including but not limited to ability, carcerality, coloniality, class, gender, labor, sexuality, race, and species.³¹ To situate my own knowledge, I try to position but not center myself.³² Throughout, I illustrate how the transboundary crisis of plastics is predicated on multiple forms of oppression about who and what is imagined as disposable.³³

In addition to humans, marine life has been sounding alarms of a plastics crisis, washing up dead with bellies full of indigestible plastics and strangled or otherwise harmed by plastics. Subsequently, Beyond Straw Men identifies the ways hashtag activists invoke and are linked to nonhuman systems. Consideration of marine life from an environmental justice perspective does not escape uneven power relations. Subhankar Banerjee argues: Multispecies justice is not theory or analysis: it is praxis. It brings concerns and conservation of biotic life and habitats into alignment with environmental justice and Indigenous rights.³⁴ While not everyone addressed in this book aspires to multispecies justice (or Democracy), the movement against plastic pollution generally values nonhuman life, as well as water. A tension that regularly resurfaces is how aquatic relations—and biodiversity more broadly—are entangled with plastics in ways that signal threats to ideals of democracy, abolition, justice, and sustainability.

Through attending to hashtag activism from the Global South and about marine life, I have grown to believe that plastics have "come to serve as the articulator of the crisis."³⁵ That is, while controversies over plastics signify crises about plastics, for reasons noted, they also provide an entry point into a wider range of contemporary contested environmental topics, such as carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, planetary fatalism, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. To analyze this complicated conjuncture, we need to consider more than statistics about plastic materials and sciences. Politics begin with desire, Gerard A. Hauser reminds us, and desires are tied to our attachments.³⁶ To better understand the plastics crisis, I believe we should engage attachments—and detachments—that arise in public controversies over plastics.³⁷

To elaborate: in a founding text of cultural studies, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts set out "to examine why and how the themes of race, crime, and youth—condensed into the image of ‘mugging’–come to serve as the articulator of the crisis, as its ideological conductor. Discourse about mugging, they argued, was animating a conservative backlash regarding the British way of life, including perceived threats from welfare, racism, employment, and American culture. Hall and colleagues take this moral panic seriously as an opportunity to explore fundamental cultural values of law and order, to unpack what mugging" was revealing and obscuring in British public discourse at the time.³⁸

Today, many invoke the language of moral panic to mock dramatic responses they feel are unwarranted (just search moral panic and in a web browser). Yet we all have some morals, and we all panic sometimes—at least I do, as the former guides how judgments are made, and the latter appears to be a reasonable reaction to a range of issues today. Dismissive invocations of moral panic miss the more complicated questions posed by Hall and colleagues about what studying a conjuncture entails: How do historical and structural conditions enable a particular matter (mugging or plastics) to become an articulator of crisis? Which forces have gone unnamed or underrecognized in public discourse, eclipsed by polarizing frames and dismissive assumptions? And at a fundamental level, how can we understand which discourses of crisis are legitimate so we can attempt to act meaningfully? To engage these complicated questions, it might be helpful to first define some key terms.

THE PLASTICS-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND THE RISE OF RESISTANCE

There are numerous types of plastics. "The term plastic, as Max Liboiron (Red River Métis) writes, refers to many types of polymers with many, many associated industrial chemicals. . . . Plastic in the singular misses things that are rather central to plastic activism, plastic science, plastic policy, and other plastic relations."³⁹ It is important, then, to consider plastics generally, as well as specific plastics in their variety.

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming, and many environmental advocates dive in by initially focusing on single-use plastics. The term single-use in the English language has referred to objects cheap enough to be thrown away since the late 1800s.⁴⁰ Today, single-use plastic generally refers to an item used once—often briefly—before it is discarded and discounted. Think of plastics in the food industry: utensils, bags, beverage bottles, straws, to-go food containers, and individual condiment sachet packets. Single-use plastics often are light, flexible, durable, impermeable, and transparent.

Single-use plastics epitomize throwaway culture, which values immediate gratification, convenience, and disposability in contrast to, for example, endurance, reparability, and sentimentality. Throwaway culture is a structure of feeling of dominant culture in the Global North. Borrowing from Raymond Williams, structure of feeling references informal social formations that have become so pervasive, they matter profoundly to our lived experiences in felt ways, even if—and perhaps because—we might not always be conscious of them.⁴¹ Single-use plastics have been integral to the social formations of throwaway culture, which emerged from a desire for profit growth in industry.

Consider packaging, which constitutes the majority of US household trash and nearly half of which is single-use.⁴² Plastic studies often recall the editor of Modern Packaging Magazine, Lloyd Stauffer, declaring in 1956 that the future of plastics is in the trash can and "that it was time for the plastics industry to stop thinking about ‘reuse’ packages and concentrate on single use. For the package that is used once and thrown away, like a tin can or a paper carton, represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units."⁴³ What this anecdote from Stauffer illustrates is how throwaway culture has been manufactured by design—and exported globally through advertising and lobbying for plastics.⁴⁴

This range of actors is why I refer to the plastics-industrial complex, which includes industries that extract or manufacture plastics (petrochemical companies), use plastics (including beverage corporations, grocers, packaging companies, and tobacco), and manage plastics (the waste and recycling industry), as well as the institutional apparatuses that enable them, including those that are private (such as advertising firms and industry trade associations) and public (such as governments). Holding this larger system accountable together enables a more accurate understanding of the conditions of possibility of our current conjuncture, even as each facet is complex.

Consider waste management. The United States produces the largest amount of plastic waste per person in the world; while it is applauded for managing plastic waste well, that plan long involved exporting 70 percent of US plastic waste to China, which in turn led to the global mismanagement of plastic waste into the ocean.⁴⁵ China, Julie Sze writes of dominant US ecological imaginaries, often is portrayed as our psychological displacement and doppleganger, our enemy and our salvation.⁴⁶ When China announced the National Sword policy to ban the import of foreign plastic waste in 2017, therefore, its decision had global ramifications, particularly for the United States.⁴⁷

One response to the National Sword policy was to maintain business as usual by exporting waste elsewhere. Sharon Lerner’s reporting during this time illustrates the consistency of the pattern: "In 2019, American exporters shipped almost 1.5 billion pounds of plastic waste to 95 countries, including Malaysia, which received more than 133 million pounds; Thailand, which got sent almost 60 million pounds; and Mexico, which got 81