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00:00:30.000Hey for the wild community, Ayanna here. Before we begin today's interview, I'd like to thank
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00:01:40.420Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today on the show, I'll be speaking with Dr. Max
00:01:47.320Liboron, an assistant professor in geography at Memorial University, where she directs the
00:01:53.200Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, also known as CLEAR. CLEAR develops
00:01:59.100feminist and anti-colonial methodologies and instruments in the natural sciences
00:02:03.980to study marine plastic pollution. Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastics?0.93
00:02:14.680Hell no. So recycling is good for ethics. You can be a good citizen. It's better than nothing,
00:02:21.240but it is not the solution because it actually allows the problem to continue.
00:02:26.780Dr. Libran has played leading roles in the establishment of the field of discard studies,
00:02:32.400the social study of waste and wasting, the global open science hardware movement,
00:02:37.840and as a figure in feminist science studies and justice-oriented citizen science.
00:02:44.360Max, thank you so much for joining us today. Like I was mentioning
00:02:48.500earlier before we began our official conversation that this topic I know is really at the forefront
00:02:57.280of people's minds as we, I think as a collective, learn more about our waste and the issues that
00:03:04.180comes with that. So thank you so much for being here and for all of the ways that you
00:03:08.200interweave your work. My pleasure. I want to say that as I was preparing for this interview,
00:03:14.920I was very much envisioning that our conversation would begin by discussing the pervasiveness of
00:03:21.500plastic and plastic pollution. But as I read your work, I became really intrigued by your framing
00:03:28.420of plastic as kin in response to the dominant discourse on plastic. So to begin our conversation,
00:03:35.100I'm hoping you can share what the plastosphere is and why plastic can no longer solely be understood
00:03:42.800as an inanimate object and how you arrived at the understanding of plastic as kin?
00:03:49.480Well, that's a lot of questions in one. Maybe I'll start with the plastosphere because that's
00:03:53.440pretty straightforward. Plastics, whether they're waste or not, are inextricable parts of living
00:03:59.520systems. Everything from the fillings in your teeth to your contraceptive devices to parts of
00:04:06.340your bones. Those are medical things that you do, plastic in your body, to make your body work.
00:04:39.760So the bacteria and then the sort of attendant organisms that eat the bacteria and grow around it don't grow in the same combinations anywhere else.
00:04:49.100And that they chose to call the plastosphere, the unique ecosystems that only exist with plastics.
00:04:54.820This is what makes plastics particularly interesting as a pollutant, although there are other pollutants that do it too, which is that there's not really a simple nature culture divide.
00:05:03.140There's not really an us and them or it and us or whatever you want to call it.
00:05:06.200And I remember this when I was on one of my first research voyages. We were out way in the middle of the open ocean. There was nothing anywhere near us that you could see above the water. And we came across this floating clump of a buoy with some ropes ensnared around it.
00:05:24.200And living around all of this was not only the bacteria and these sorts of things of the plastosphere, but in huge, like I could eat them huge fish, right? So it was acting as what's called a fish aggregator, which is something that provides shade and food for fish.
00:05:41.460And most of these fish were tropical reef fish. So we're halfway between Bermuda and New York City when we found this. And so it had probably started closer to Bermuda near the shore. And this entire little fish village had moved out into the ocean. And the debate with all the scientists on board was, do we take it out and kill everything? Or do we leave it in, even though it's pollution?
00:06:01.620I personally voted to leave it in, but I was vastly outnumbered and outvoted because the other
00:06:09.820scientists understood their primary and really only goal to get rid of plastics. And so, they
00:06:15.480took it out and the fish died and all the things living on it died. And so, this idea of annihilation,
00:06:21.380right, the ban, getting rid of straws, getting rid of plastics, boo plastic in a very complete sort
00:06:26.640of way is very, very strong, even with scientists, you know, across different social movements,
00:06:31.700across different sectors as a sort of annihilation relationship. But I think if you do annihilate
00:06:37.920plastics, just, you know, you can do a thought experiment. You would end up in a B-Hore movie0.93
00:06:41.460really fast. Like our roads would crumble or airplanes would fall out of the sky. Like just1.00
00:06:46.100things would immediately cease working. And I'm not saying, yay, plastic, let's plastic it up
00:06:51.540every plastic chance we plastic get. But there are certain things that plastic is good at and
00:06:56.200that we need it for and certain things that it shouldn't be used for, like packaging. Packaging
00:07:00.960gets used for a few minutes and we've turned it into one of the most durable, you've used one of
00:07:05.640the most durable materials in the world to do it. If I ran a design class, I would fail the student
00:07:10.380who turned in, you know, the temporary use with the longest lived material combination sort of
00:07:15.460design idea. So, when people talk about the ubiquity of plastics, they usually mean disposables
00:07:21.620or single use. Within that, I don't think they usually mean medical waste, which is a very
00:07:27.220important form of single use. I think they usually mean certain types of consumer waste.
00:07:31.600And within that, I actually think they mostly mean packaging. So if you want to talk about
00:07:35.580the annihilation of packaging, that's very, very, very different than talking about the
00:07:39.120annihilation of plastics. So that's the plastosphere part. The kin part, I am usually
00:07:46.600pretty hesitant to talk about mostly because there's a lot of a lot of misunderstanding about
00:07:51.260kinship particularly in academia which is where I spend most of my conversations so there's this
00:07:56.880like fetishization of kinship that is rampant and well-fed in academia right now we're like this is
00:08:02.420kin and that is kin and chemicals are kin and your left shoe is kin and you know and it's usually a
00:08:08.240very colonial and even, I would say, imperial mindset where you go out and you stick your flag
00:08:17.040in some kin and you say, that's my kin now. I like whales. Whales are my kin. Mine, right?
00:08:22.580That's the point of kin is that they claim you. You don't claim them, right? My family has a lot
00:08:28.060of adoption in it. And so, what's very clear to us, especially if you're going back to try and
00:08:34.340find your biological family, if that's what you want to get up to, is that that family isn't yours
00:08:39.520to claim. That family has to claim you. That identity has to claim you if you're actually
00:08:43.700going to become, sort of expand your family, expand your kinship, right? You don't get to be
00:08:49.420like you, family, here, now. Also, family and kin isn't inherently good. So, the reason I think
00:08:56.680plastics are useful to think about kin, if people actually get it right, understand kin isn't like
00:09:01.820a possessive term, which is often how it's used, is that, you know, everyone has that0.98
00:09:06.660asshole uncle, that abusive whatever, right?1.00
00:09:09.240The abuse in your family, something like that.0.99
00:09:11.140So plastics challenge the often fetishized concept of kinship as an inherent set of good
00:09:59.560I see a lot more black and white situations that are not very kimmy.
00:10:04.160Yeah, I see what you're saying in terms of plastic not being inherently bad.0.99
00:10:10.160But when we're using this long-lived material for short, disposable subjects, so to speak, it's stupid, actually.0.98
00:10:20.660It's really not an intelligent way to go about it.0.92
00:10:23.760And yeah, and I want to say that I was – oh, yeah, please.
00:10:28.480Well, I was going to say it actually is intelligent, just through a different set of intelligences. So I think this is a really important point that a lot of activists don't do. And that's instead of being like, whoa, you know, packaging people are bad and stupid. And that was stupid. That's stupid design. What you'd say is, no, under what conditions does this make sense?
00:10:48.440Under what conditions does it make sense to make some of your shortest-lived commodity
00:10:51.820objects like packaging out of our longest-lived materials?
00:11:00.460And by and large, the answer to that question, the reason it makes sense is it is so damn
00:11:04.640cheap because oil and the petrochemical industry, which are the same industry, same as plastics,
00:11:09.920are so well subsidized and they have so much policy capture that right now.
00:11:17.400and actually for almost all time, virgin plastic, you know, raw oil sort of feedstock for plastics
00:11:23.780are cheaper. They're more predictable. They're more dependable. They're easier to make stuff out
00:11:28.400of than recycled materials and then alternative materials. So of course that's what you make it
00:11:33.540out of. So if you want to make change, you can't say like, well, that's dumb. You have to say,0.99
00:11:39.200how does that make sense? Ooh, I love being challenged like this. Thank you for taking that
00:11:44.780there. And yeah, no, I completely see your perspective on that. And yeah, I was thinking
00:11:53.320about the subsidies or about subsidies in general the other day. I was speaking to a dear friend
00:11:58.540about reforestation and doing restoration without the use of petrochemical driven machinery. And
00:12:07.640my friend was saying, well, you know, it would just be so expensive and the labor would be so
00:12:12.000expensive. I said, well, the other way is so expensive too, but it's subsidized. And that's
00:12:16.140why we're able to use bulldozers and things like that in our quote unquote restoration
00:12:21.860methodologies because it's subsidized. It's not because it's necessarily cheaper than anything
00:12:26.980else, but it's very interesting to see what gets subsidized and what doesn't and therefore how
00:12:32.920we're using certain materials or petrochemicals or certain ways of doing things. So thank you for
00:12:39.180calling that out in this conversation. I think that's a really important angle to see it at,
00:12:44.160or else we're really not going to get anywhere with shifting the way that we do things. So
00:12:48.420I want to say that I was really struck by something I came across in an interview you
00:12:54.280gave with Frank News titled Anti-Colonial Science and the Ubiquity of Plastic, where you were quoted
00:13:00.860as saying, quote, the number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than
00:13:08.100half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 1950s.
00:13:15.460That's living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently
00:13:20.940than totally packaged in plastic, end quote. Bringing in this living memory as a response
00:13:27.460to plastic pollution is incredibly simple, yet really profound. And I would love if you could
00:13:33.140speak to the history of plastic production in terms of how and why its necessity was manufactured
00:13:38.520and what the initial response was to the creation of disposability. What is our living memory of
00:13:46.360plastic? Well, so first of all, the hour in that conversation and this entire conversation is
00:13:52.980actually extremely fragmented. So the history I'm going to tell is the American history and
00:13:57.240the dominant consumer society of the US, which is largely white and industrially driven.
00:14:05.160So, and that is the history of plastic. There's a couple of different histories and there's a lot
00:14:08.880of nuance to this history that I'm just going to skate right over. I mean, there's lots of really
00:14:12.040good sources out there for more nuance. Basically, plastic comes out of a sort of rising industrial
00:14:16.840science where one of the values is try things out and see what happens. And if it works,
00:14:21.340awesome, we can put it towards something. And so there's a lot of, there's different types of
00:14:25.120plastic. Some of them never really get out of the industrial drawing room. Some of them do.
00:14:30.280Billiard bowls were one of the first sort of consumer type plastics, sort of a cellulose
00:14:35.040base. But the problem with that plastic was that it was really unstable. And so sometimes if they
00:14:39.820got hit really hard, they would explode. Super downside. So they kept working on it. Then there
00:14:45.960was a couple generations in terms of industrial generations later, there was bakelite, which was
00:14:52.420a little more stable, but also highly flammable. So there were all these different plastics that
00:14:56.680were being produced, but they weren't yet really mass produced until the Second World War.1.00
00:15:02.780The Second World War helped get some of these kinks out of the system. So things stopped1.00
00:15:06.320exploding and melting in the rain and like turning to mud and stuff like that. And so you can think
00:15:10.760of mass production as being quite enabled by military infrastructures. So the First World0.78
00:15:16.720War and then the Second World War really helps mature the actual material of plastic. And in
00:15:21.960Between the World Wars and the 30s into the 50s, and after the Second World War, there's this problem where when you have the two world wars in the United States and in other places in the world, you start having a making-do sort of attitude, right?
00:15:34.580Like all of your resources are going into the war effort, and so people are saving and skimping and reusing and repairing and all of these sorts of activities that stick around after the wars.
00:15:45.180And the problem from an industry perspective is that if people are doing that, then they're not actually consuming.
00:16:18.660What he meant was we need to find ways to move plastics through households, not into households, and then they stay. And so we talked about disposability as the thing that would lead away from these saturated consumer markets and sort of make this giant, beautiful hole where plastics would go into it and people would just throw money right into this nice conveyor belt.
00:16:42.180And so that was a very strategic effect, strategic plan.
00:16:45.280But the problem was because society was like making, do, repairing and not spending, they
00:17:10.400So this isn't even plastic yet. And there were riots, specifically soldiers rioting, because they thought that was pretty effed up, this wasteful thing. And what were they fighting for anyway? There was also problems with a lot of these disposals were sold to housewives to, you know, make work more efficient for housewives. And as part of that packaging was like disposable hygiene for women's menstrual cycles.
00:17:35.560and there are a lot of really funny stories in the archive that don't actually circulate very well
00:17:41.280about women reusing what were supposed to be disposables and also trying to deal with an
00:17:46.300infrastructure like toilets and stuff like that that weren't quite used to disposables yet so
00:17:51.960there's a little bit of a lag in some cases funny funny horrible horrifying stories about being at
00:17:57.020like your in-laws dinner and you have a tampon and there's nowhere to put it in the bathroom
00:18:16.820is that quote unquote humans are inherently wasteful0.98
00:18:19.660or we are just like a trashy species that trashes things.0.96
00:18:23.520Besides the super problematic universal we there0.59
00:18:25.960that erases like very important cultural
00:18:28.580and historical and political differences
00:18:30.420is the problem that actually even the we that you're talking about, like Americans,
00:18:34.460like white middle-class Americans, not even them, turns out. It was a strategy. It was a plan.
00:18:39.880It was baked. There was resistance. That resistance was overcome. This is a learned
00:18:44.480behavior. And then the infrastructure to support it was put in place so that there weren't actually
00:18:49.020other infrastructures you could choose from after a while. So if you go to the grocery store right
00:18:53.600now, especially around here where I live in Newfoundland, I dare you to find any food source
00:18:58.980that you want that's not packaged. You can't. It's not behavior. It's infrastructure. And that
00:19:03.160is by design. And that is not by design by what most people mean by quote-unquote us,
00:19:08.260right? People in social movements, people who mean good.
00:19:11.680I'm also thinking about in this vein, I'd really like to also understand the timescales of plastic.
00:19:18.140You know, if you could speak to how they change and act over generations.
00:19:21.780so the the problem with answering that is that a lot of it is speculation and models because
00:19:29.520plastics have been around for a fraction of the time that they're modeled to exist
00:19:34.020right so if plastics last you know even a thousand years which is conservative
00:19:38.300they've only been really around since 46 right 1946 in the way that they are now right and then
00:19:45.820more modern sort of plastics, maybe since the 70s, really. So that's only 40 years out of like
00:19:52.4801,000 or 10,000. So in a lot of ways, it's hard to tell. What we do know is that when they hang
00:19:58.820out in sunlight or in acidic conditions or in abrasive conditions, so like going up and down
00:20:04.900shorelines in the waves, they fragment. So because plastics are made of really long, strong polymer
00:20:11.160bonds, right? These super long carbon and hydrogen chains, they're really, really strong bonds.
00:20:17.060So that molecular bond doesn't really break down. That's why plastics last so long. That's why
00:20:22.560they're so flexible and so strong, right? All these sorts of things. So when they're in the
00:20:26.600sun or in acidic or abrasive conditions, they'll fragment, but those polymer bonds will stay
00:20:31.700intact. So basically it's just fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces while staying
00:20:36.980completely chemically the same. And those fragments can get so small that they can be
00:20:42.260the size of nanoparticles, which if you know anyone who works in the nano sort of area,
00:20:46.680they work really, really hard to make things at that size. And plastic, they'll just get there
00:20:51.300by their own selves if you leave them in, you know, like on a beach, right, or something like
00:20:55.000that. And they have very different effects at these different sizes because they hang out in
00:20:58.860very different ecosystems. So I remember, oh, it must have been 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago,
00:21:04.740reading a study where they found plastic circulating in the gills of fish and people
00:21:08.420like, whoa, that's great. That's so, that's so small. Now we know it circulates in the blood of
00:21:14.100muscles. Oh, that's so small. Now we know it. So, you know, so it's, so they just, the different
00:21:19.520sizes mean that they're interacting in very different relationships in ecosystems and in
00:21:24.780worlds. So when they're bigger, like fishing gear that you can see with your eyes from a distance,
00:21:29.440they tend to do things like entangle like whales and turtles and that sort of stuff when they get
00:21:34.940really really really small we're actually just researching that now because it's harder to tell
00:21:38.980what they get up to so there's a lot a lot of different stuff going on the other thing is with
00:21:43.420most of those models and some of them might have changed by now but at least in the lot from a
00:21:47.920couple years ago and earlier when you see an estimate like oh this kind of plastic breaks
00:21:51.960down in 10 000 years the way that scientists figured that out was to blast the plastic with
00:21:58.520all of the things that make it fragment. So bright light, bright UV light, acidic conditions,
00:22:03.860often using urea, which is the same thing as urine, in like highly vibrating sort of abrasive
00:22:09.520conditions. And then they would measure how those bonds weakened or flexed, not came apart because
00:22:15.520they didn't, but weakened and flexed, and then mathematically extrapolated that. Turns out there
00:22:20.360are very few real world conditions of like brightly lit, vibrating jars of pee where you find
00:22:26.280plastics. Usually they're hanging out in very different environments. So a lot of those estimates
00:22:30.320are very estimating to the point where I basically just say plastics laugh forever. Let's treat them
00:22:35.820that way. Let's not be like, well, if it's only 2000 years, because what if it's 20,000 years?
00:22:41.780What if it's something else? So, because we don't really know, not from an empirical sort of, oh,
00:22:47.560yes, I have watched that plastic degrade. The other thing we don't know a lot about is once
00:22:51.380once those polymers do break into smaller chains, are those smaller chains toxic? What do they get
00:22:57.980up to? What are they like? We don't have a super good grasp on that. And that includes things for
00:23:02.580like bioplastics and stuff like that. When they turn into smaller chunks, those smaller chunks
00:23:06.940are running around now in the blood of muscles and stuff like that. How do they act? We don't really know.
00:23:21.380drawing upon plastics and deep time i'm thinking about how we're only ever moving pollution
00:23:44.480not eliminating it and i'd like to explore the fallacy of many proposed solutions that seek to
00:23:51.140remove plastics, especially in relation to marine pollution. And you openly discuss how the push to
00:23:57.260quote, remove plastics from the ocean is fundamentally misguided in that it ignores
00:24:02.480how deeply embedded plastics have become in the ecosystem, especially microplastics, which I feel
00:24:07.880like is something you were just speaking to. So why is it that nearly all technical solutions have
00:24:13.080failed to address plastic pollution? And is it even possible to have a solution that addresses
00:24:18.660plastic pollution within our current economy. Yeah. So we're about to make a lot of listeners
00:24:23.740kind of sad. And I apologize for that. Hopefully we'll loop around. And so one of the most
00:24:30.400charismatic examples of this sort of cleanup fallacy is Boyan Slats, the cleanup array,
00:24:36.080right? Which is basically a big broom net thing that goes through the water and quote unquote
00:24:40.800cleans plastics. Almost every single scientist, marine biologist I know, everyone I know who is
00:24:46.300a scientist who's looked at this project, has criticized it. First of all, because it doesn't
00:24:50.460actually get to the more problematic sizes, which are the smallest sizes, because its net holes are
00:24:54.880kind of big, bigger than five centimeters or millimeters. And the vast majority of plastics
00:24:58.680in the ocean are less than five millimeters. It's about the size of a grain of rice. But also
00:25:03.120because it's sort of a plankton killing machine. So it really roughs up plankton and it disturbs
00:25:07.980their flagella. And a plankton without flagella ain't no kind of plankton. It just sort of drifts
00:25:12.160and dies. Well, I mean, it was drifting anyway, but without flagella, it can't eat. It can't
00:25:16.180repel itself. There is a lot of concern about it also killing larger animals. And I have seen
00:25:20.720photos. You're trying to clean up the biggest thing in the world that is full of some of the0.99
00:25:24.820smallest things in the world. You have a scale problem immediately. I think someone's done the
00:25:28.880math and it would take like a gazillion billion tankers, all the tankers in the world working
00:25:32.460full time just to clean up a small fraction of one ocean, right? These are the scales we're
00:25:37.860talking about. People have trouble imagining how big the ocean is. It is too big to clean,
00:25:41.400my friends. And so the solution isn't to hang out downstream after the plastics have been
00:25:46.800created. It's to go upstream and to turn off the tap. So you already know, and most people
00:25:51.920already know this, right? If you walk into your bathtub and unbeknownst to you, your bathtub has
00:25:57.020been running and you have a flood, do you get the mop or do you turn off the tap? I would say the
00:26:02.140vast majority of you will turn off the tap and then go get the mop. That's exactly what we have
00:26:06.280to do. If we're just going to sit on the side of the bathtub as it fills with water continuously
00:26:10.480and mop, you can sort of see the limited benefits of it. Are there some benefits? Sure, absolutely,
00:26:16.820right? But it's not the primary action that's going to address the problem to scale. And so
00:26:22.260ceasing the production of plastics, particularly packaging, which accounts for about 30% of
00:26:27.820plastic, it's almost no matter where you are in the world, roughly 30, that's the solution. And
00:26:32.160most of, or even all, maybe just most of the people I know who study waste and waste systems
00:26:38.280always say, hey, if you want to deal with waste, go upstream. Once you got downstream,
00:26:42.920like it's just there. And you're right. You're absolutely right. You just defer it. You just
00:26:46.880shuffle it around. You shuffle it into a landfill. Well, that's going to get flooded under climate
00:26:51.660change. And even if it's 10,000 years, those plastics are going back in the water. Once
00:26:55.600Boylan Slat's cleanup array gets those plastics, where do they go? They go in landfill. Ocean is
00:27:01.140downhill from everything. Those plastics will end up back in the ocean. So it's not a coincidence0.89
00:27:05.840is that some of the Ocean Cleanup Array's biggest sponsors are the packaging industry
00:27:09.860because it lets them keep on keeping on with that faucet while they're handing out mops.
00:27:17.200No, it's really important for us to understand this. And I'm thinking about these upstream ways
00:27:26.960of turning off the tap, so to speak. And we talked a little bit about oil subsidies earlier.
00:27:32.860And so I'm curious to hear if you have any thoughts on how we stop these oil subsidies and if you think that would be one of the ways in which we turn off the tap, so to speak, of plastic creations for things like packaging and so on and so forth.
00:27:51.660Yeah, so I would definitely say that oil subsidies are a core area.
00:27:55.540Divestment from fossil fuels in general would be a core area because of the raw feedstock
00:28:00.420of climate change and the raw feedstock of plastics.
00:28:20.700Right, because that's always true, that action is about reaching across difference and scaling up, as it were, out of consumerism and into citizenship, into coalitions, into other things like that.
00:28:35.300Yeah, and I'm a big believer of going where it's feasible.
00:28:38.840So instead of trying to convince people who you will never convince, going for infrastructure and going for people who already value or believe what you do.
00:28:46.440And those are some of just the basic tenets of effective activism. I didn't come up with those. But yeah, so I work a lot with the province of Newfoundland and Labrador when it comes to this sort of stuff. Yeah.
00:28:58.280Yeah. I think back to a mentor of mine, Joanna Macy, who talks about systems theories. And I remember in one of her workshops that I took years ago, and she was saying something like, you know, don't go to the CEO of ExxonMobil to begin with. Start with your community. Start with the people who are on the fence.
00:29:19.580and I think that preaching to the choir or preaching to people that are interested in the
00:29:25.940choir actually is really powerful because the choir needs attention and the choir needs
00:29:30.940organization and we all can start somewhere and it doesn't need to be starting with the thing that
00:29:37.140seems the most difficult or trying to convince somebody who is so deep in creation so I'm with
00:29:44.640you there and I want to go back to something we were talking about with the polymers and
00:29:50.440the chemicals that were being leached and I understand that plastic isn't necessarily the
00:29:55.480problem it is the polymers that decay and the that leach the chemicals and by recognizing this
00:30:00.880we can understand that plastic isn't inherently evil although I know there are times that I have
00:30:06.840definitely thought that and probably people listening have also felt that so I get you
00:30:10.460but I'm wondering, how does this thinking inform what you've referenced to as a local plastic
00:30:18.100economy? And what might our consumption look like if we had to be responsible for the byproducts
00:30:24.600of plastic production? And maybe a third part to that question, and I can re-ask it if it feels
00:30:30.500like too much at once, but where and how does plastic make sense? Yeah, it's a pretty big
00:30:36.260question. And I certainly can't and shouldn't provide a universal answer to that. I think
00:30:41.120that'd be very unethical and also incorrect. It just wouldn't be correct. So maybe I'll just take
00:30:46.040an example, a sort of parable, and then maybe we can work through that. So if you take seriously
00:30:54.620this sort of material flows idea, like you're proposing, so the lab that I run, the plastic
00:31:00.680pollution lab I run, there are a few things that we don't do because of this material flow
00:31:06.080problem that you've identified, right? What if you're responsible for your own waste?
00:31:09.920So we've started thinking about, in our anticolonial science, this assumed access0.81
00:31:14.080to indigenous land to put your waste in, including scientific waste when you're doing
00:31:18.400plastic pollution research. One form of this waste are plastic gloves, which we go through a lot of,
00:31:24.260latex gloves. Another is KOH, potassium hydroxide, which is a chemical you use to dissolve
00:31:30.400tissues and stuff so that you can get to the plastic. So if you want to study, say,
00:31:34.060mussels or clams or these bivalves, you can't really dissect the belly of a bivalve because
00:31:39.720it doesn't have a belly. So what you do is you take out everything inside of it and then you
00:31:43.620dissolve it in KOH. KOH is very toxic. And so where does that go? It goes onto indigenous land
00:31:50.940to be quote unquote neutralized. So as a lab, we decided to not do that anymore, not assume access
00:31:57.080to land outside the lab for our waste, that kind of waste. And the result for that is that we
00:32:02.240don't use plastic gloves for some really, truly disgusting work because we mostly look in the
00:32:08.140guts of animals for plastics. With one exception, we put them on when we work with seal because you
00:32:13.500can get something called seal finger from seal blood, which is when you have a cut on your
00:32:16.860finger and the blood gets in and then it paralyzes you. So that's not good. So we will use gloves
00:32:22.940with seal, but not other things. And that means you have to hang out with some super, super gross0.54
00:32:27.240things, like super decayed cod guts that are full of poo, because guts end in your poop shoot,0.80
00:32:32.720spoiler. So we work with poo and partially digested stuff. And so we get in there with
00:32:37.800our fingernails. And that is gross. But that is also our commitment and grossness versus
00:32:42.920colonialism. When you wait out, we're going to stick with grossness. For KOH, what that means
00:32:50.320is we do not study bivalves. So we don't use KOH. It means our work takes way longer than
00:32:57.120our peers, which means it takes us longer to publish because not using KOH means you're using
00:33:01.420your eyeballs and eyeballs are just much slower when there's a bunch of gunk around them.
00:33:06.540It also means we will never study bivalves. I mean, we can't do it. So when people say,
00:33:11.680hey, why don't you extend this to shellfish, which are also important here, we're like,
00:33:15.680well, we don't have a process that we think is just to study that. And so we will not study that.
00:33:22.040So there's always this rhetoric of like, oh, well, you have to have your cake and eat it too.
00:33:26.080If you want to get rid of fossil fuels, how will you have your cell phone?
00:33:49.900But we still have plastics in the lab, right?
00:33:52.840Sometimes when we don't have other choices.
00:33:54.920we're still also working on what to do instead of latex gloves that yeah are feasible so always
00:34:01.300moving on that does that sort of get towards your question yeah i feel like that gets to
00:34:06.320what our consumption would look like if we are responsible for those byproducts and
00:34:11.440i'm wondering does that also tie into the local plastic economy does i was interested in in that
00:34:19.180as well and wondering if you could speak to that too uh well currently i i don't think there's such
00:34:23.800a thing as a local plastic economy because the plastic manufacturers are like the DuPonts and
00:34:30.080the Exxon, they're huge, huge, huge conglomerates. So it would be an exercise in imagining a local
00:34:36.460plastic economy. And chances are excellent that there wouldn't be much of one because the economy
00:34:42.740that requires plastic right now, which is usually what starts with extraction, oil and natural gas
00:34:48.000extraction goes into fracking towers, or sorry, cracking towers, not fracking towers. Fracking is
00:34:53.540part of the extraction. Cracking towers, these are not local instruments. So Newfoundland, where I
00:35:01.840live, the island of Newfoundland and Labrador, there is offshore oil here. That oil doesn't stay
00:35:06.600here. It goes far, far away to be processed, and then we get plastic shipped back in. I don't think
00:35:12.080that could be called the local economy because you can't even track it. So the local plastic economy
00:35:16.940is an exercise in imagination. It is not a thing at the moment.
00:35:22.080And maybe it wouldn't be, at least for disposable plastics. I mean, I could imagine
00:35:26.960the more local we become, the less we would need the disposable plastics. I do think what you were
00:35:34.080saying about there are certain plastics that are, I don't know, I don't want to use the word
00:35:39.360necessary, but are helpful. And so to not put all plastics in the same category is bad, or we should
00:35:46.240get rid of altogether? Yeah. So for instance, I use the example of pacemakers a lot. So in all
00:35:52.240my many years of researching marine plastics, I have never found a pacemaker on a shoreline or
00:35:56.700in a seal. That tends not to be what I find, right? There are other, they're not to scale.
00:36:03.120They don't, they don't quote unquote leak out of infrastructure as easily. These pacemakers,
00:36:07.460you don't like lose your pacemaker very easily. There's definitely different, potentially proper
00:36:12.600places for plastics. But I definitely think packaging is not generally one of them. And
00:36:18.080the reason that packaging is useful is that it extends the shelf life of food. So, if you don't
00:36:26.800have plastic, then you don't have these massive global food economies. Is that a bad thing?
00:36:31.740Do we need a global food economy? Maybe not, certainly to the extent that we have it now,
00:36:37.140because we have lived, again, in living memory without the kind of global food economy we have
00:36:42.120now. Yes. Yes. I'm so happy you spoke to that because that's, you know, what I was trying to
00:36:46.580get at with this local plastic economy. If we are, you know, eating more locally, we would need to
00:36:52.240preserve food as long as it takes to ship something all the way from say Indonesia into our local co-op
00:36:59.120in California, for instance. So yeah, I'm totally with you there. And I'd also like to discuss the
00:37:06.520feasibility of recycling and where our recyclables are even going at this point. And I know many
00:37:12.760people are totally skeptical of the recycling industry, especially given that out of the 15
00:37:18.540to 30% of recyclables that are retrieved in the US, approximately half are buried or burned due
00:37:25.840to contamination and market fluctuations. But I'm not even sure how many of us are actually
00:37:32.020aware of why recycling isn't working or what's happening to what we are disposing of.
00:37:40.300So I'm wondering, is it failing because of lack of participation or the materiality of our products?
00:37:48.860I would say neither of those two things in the biggest category. So if you're interested in
00:37:56.620this question, I highly, highly, highly recommend Samantha McBride's book called Recycling
00:38:00.700reconsidered. Samantha McBride is brilliant. She is also the research head honcho at the New York
00:38:06.820City Department of Sanitation. So what she says lands in a very real way into infrastructure.
00:38:12.520So first of all, different materials get recycled or are more or less recyclable. So aluminum,
00:38:18.780for example, is very recyclable because it's very, very expensive and time-consuming to mine
00:38:24.740bauxite, which is the ore for aluminum. And so that's why you'll see people who waste informal
00:38:32.200waste pickers who are professional waste pickers, they'll often go for metal and aluminum before
00:38:36.960they'll go for other stuff, right? That might be where they specialize. And the reason is
00:38:40.020there's usually a market for aluminum, right? You can actually make money off it.
00:38:44.160Paper, not so much. Glass, hell's no. Glass is heavy. It's easy to make and it breaks all the
00:38:49.880time. So there's almost never a market for glass. Plastics, which is my wheelhouse, is a hot mess
00:38:57.460because actually there's no such thing as plastic in the singular. There are plastics and there are
00:39:02.660many, many types and they have many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many plasticizers or
00:39:07.680monomers added to them. And then there's different methods for making the plastic. So if you take
00:39:12.480like PET, if you extrude it versus whether you blow mold it actually means it has to get recycled
00:39:17.960differently. If it has this plasticizer versus that plasticizer, it means it has a different
00:39:21.820melting temperature, which means you have to recycle it differently. And sometimes you can't
00:39:25.500tell what that is because those are proprietary blends. So when you get a whole pile of plastic,
00:39:31.960it will melt at different temperatures and turn into an amorphous blob that you cannot do a whole
00:39:36.700lot with. And because the raw feedstock of plastics, oil, natural gas are heavily subsidized,
00:39:43.580it is almost always less expensive to buy rod feedstock than to use recyclables.
00:39:50.940So there is that. The thing about recycling, my number one problem with recycling is that the
00:39:57.500way it's been greened, and by the way, it was greened almost entirely by the container industry.
00:40:03.220So the recycling symbol was commissioned by the Container Corporation of America, which was a
00:40:07.220paperboard company in 1970. And you'll see things like when municipal, especially large urban
00:40:13.640municipalities like New York City or something like that, when their recycling programs are
00:40:17.700imperiled, the people who buy them out are usually the container plastics and cardboard industries.
00:40:24.020The thing about recycling and the way it's been greened is that there's a way out of the problem
00:40:29.680of disposability that is green, that is called recycling, right? So before, the reason that
00:40:35.620recycling became so popular in the 70s, the way it was promoted through Keep America Beautiful,
00:40:39.520et cetera, is because these disposables, largely beverage containers, started showing up in places
00:40:44.940they weren't supposed to, like in ditches and in farmer's field and in cow stomachs, which were
00:40:49.400harming the cows. And there's a lot of outrage around this, especially in the American sort of
00:40:53.760prairie area. And so recycling was one way to deal with this problem, Keep America Beautiful, and
00:40:59.240sort of talking about litter and saying this isn't an industrial problem, this is a human behavior
00:41:03.560problem. And then also, don't worry, we've saved you with recycling was a two-pronged fork. What's
00:41:09.020a two-pronged fork? I guess it's a meat fork. A meat fork method to deal with the problem of
00:41:14.700disposability without endangering disposability. Again, because it was the way to stop saturating
00:41:19.940markets by moving things through households instead of into them. So, recycling is a very
00:41:25.500big part of that master plan. Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastics?
00:41:33.560Hell no. I know Samantha McBride also recycles and she would say the same thing.
00:41:38.640So recycling is good for ethics. You can be a good citizen. It's better than nothing,
00:41:43.640but it is not the solution because it actually allows the problem to continue. It allows that
00:41:48.160tap to keep going, that bathtub tap to keep going. It gives you some mops.
00:41:52.240Right. It's the way that recycling is marketed by industry is a tool that
00:41:57.040creates this social license to waste more because we feel like, oh, well, we can just recycle it.
00:42:03.560But I'm really happy that you're speaking to this because I know that a lot of people that I hear from, especially environmentalists or activists, kind of have come to this feeling of defeat in the sense of, well, you know, China isn't even buying our recycling anymore.
00:42:23.240Like, what's the point of recycling? We can't really recycle. We can't even send it anywhere. So let's just throw everything in the trash. It's a waste of time.
00:42:32.960So I definitely feel this type of defeatism when it comes to recycling.
00:42:39.260And then scaling out even further, it also feels important to acknowledge that waste
00:42:43.700more broadly in that our garbage or municipal solid waste makes up less than 3% of total
00:42:50.700waste with the remaining 97% being made up of industrial solid waste.
00:42:55.980So I'm wondering also, how is the waste of today different than previous generations?
00:43:00.540And how can we address industrial waste given the tremendous impact it has?
00:43:06.680You know, and I guess I'm thinking, too, when we're trying to think of our ethics on recycling or our own individual waste, but knowing that, like I was saying, 97% is of this industrial solid waste that many of us probably have no control over.
00:43:21.340I mean, maybe we do in some indirect ways.
00:43:26.200So, first of all, that 93% or 97% stat, I've written on it before.
00:43:30.540It's a super sketchy stat because the 97 is self-reported industry and a lot of that stuff
00:43:36.400doesn't move into a place where it can be scrutinized or tested. So it's a super shaky
00:43:41.700number. Also, a lot of that is mining waste, like mining tailings, which are super heavy
00:43:45.240and wet, agricultural waste, including sometimes runoff. So it's a sketchy number, but
00:43:52.100like what I say, it's an imprecise number. However, it's a very telling number because
00:43:56.940even if, let's say it's like 80-20, it still has the same flavor, right? Yeah. So, folks who work
00:44:04.560on mining are actually working on waste. People who work in the food movement are actually working
00:44:10.560on waste. People who work on extraction industries and climate change are actually working on waste.
00:44:15.380People who work on clothing and textile issues and fast fashion are actually working on waste.
00:44:20.680So, the good news is most of us are already working on waste by targeting these larger
00:44:25.740industrial, large-scale systems. One of the cool things that happens is, so if you go back to,
00:44:32.940say, recycling and, you know, how do we scale this sort of stuff, there's a very cool group
00:44:37.640called GAIA, Global Alternatives Against Incinerator Alliance. I might have gotten that
00:44:43.280wrong, but those words are all in there. They do what's called brand audits when they deal with
00:44:48.380waste on their shorelines, plastic waste on their shorelines. So, instead of saying like,
00:44:52.100So what I do when I do a shoreline study as a scientist is I say, I have found this many thread plastics, this many fiber film plastics, this many fragment plastics, and this many bead plastics, whatever.
00:45:02.920They say, we found this many Coca-Cola products, this many Unilever products, and because those are accountability metrics.
00:45:10.500So even though we can't always access and see the waste stuff, we know that every time we have an instance that we can see of a piece of trash or something that comes out, we know there's this huge infrastructure behind it.
00:45:24.580And we can try and evoke that by following it back up the pipe the way that these brand audits do.
00:45:29.480So when Gaia does these press releases, they don't say, we have found so many more film plastics and other types of plastics.
00:45:34.800they say the number one polluter on Philippine coastlines is Coca-Cola for the third year in the
00:45:40.080row. Coca-Cola, what are you going to do about this? So there are ways to bridge these scales.
00:45:45.440There are techniques to bridge these scales, even without going and looking in the backyard of
00:45:50.040Coca-Cola, which doesn't exist, to see what its sort of waste properties are. And that's all you
00:45:56.360can do. One of the things that I talked to a lot of young activists about is not to do violence
00:46:00.460against yourself about how you can't do things that are literally impossible. You should release
00:46:04.540that. You should release that to the universe and not feel guilty for things that are quite
00:46:08.920literally impossible. And then adjacent to that, systems of power are not very faithful in
00:46:15.120reproducing themselves actually. So capitalism, for instance, DuPont, something like that,
00:46:20.860they're invested in their own longevity and maintaining themselves. But in the processes
00:46:24.600where they do that, it's not like every time they do something, it works perfectly and it's
00:46:29.920even and smooth and all you can do is throw your soft little body against the monolith.
00:46:34.080They actually reproduce things really unfaithfully.
00:46:36.440So some of the most success I've had in activism is when I've talked to former DuPont scientists
00:46:42.440who go into science, go into chemistry, because they mean to do good.
00:46:46.100They want to make the world better, and they end up working for DuPont.
00:46:49.040They are the quote-unquote bad guys that people think are monolith, but actually they're
00:46:52.680leaving behind these trails, especially when they retire, when they put things in archives.
00:46:57.800They're making these sort of chinches and armor.
00:47:00.780They're unfaithful reproducers of the system.0.99
00:47:03.360that they're part of. And that leaves spaces. There's an artist that looks at this for military
00:47:08.000waste, I believe, or he's trying to find military installations, black sites. And he does this by0.60
00:47:12.460looking for the unfaithful parts where they try and reproduce secrecy, but they can't because
00:47:16.640they have to put their poo somewhere. And so when they ship out their sewage, he tracks that and0.53
00:47:21.700that tells him where the military bases are. So this is just an example of how these systems are
00:47:27.040reproducing themselves in really patchy, uneven ways. And you can find those little bits and
00:47:33.040work on them there in various ways just to sort of help with the despair situation that might be
00:47:38.900happening at this point in the podcast. No, it's good to have these silver linings or
00:47:44.080these ways that we can be subversive and yeah, just find the fissures in the system that we can
00:47:52.980snake up and find ways of breaking this chain. I do want to ask another question that also may
00:48:00.880feel a bit heavy, but I think is extremely important to discuss. So to transition the
00:48:06.940conversation, I want to talk about the amount of plastic in our bodies and the nuances in
00:48:12.080defining pollution and harm and how alarmed we should be in terms of plasticizers as endocrine
00:48:18.800disruptors. Now, I think many of us are familiar with the various studies showing that humans all
00:48:24.240over the world, regardless of their personal plastic use, contain chemicals that originate
00:48:29.900from plastic, chemicals which correlate to infertility, miscarriage, reduced brain development,
00:48:36.920obesity, diabetes, cancer, and neurological disorders. Now, these statistics are obviously
00:48:43.580extremely alarming, but I'm wondering, are we justified in our panic? And if so,
00:48:49.320is there anything that can be done to remediate plastic from our bodies?
00:48:54.640So first of all, I'll say I never prefer panic because it's really uncoordinated. It doesn't
00:48:58.320get a lot of stuff done. So concern, yes, but hopefully slightly more coordinated concern.
00:49:03.660So yeah, I'm concerned about the amount of plasticizers and industrial chemicals in general,
00:49:09.620including ones that aren't plasticizers that are in bodies. They're in all bodies tested. It's
00:49:13.520ubiquitous, but very uneven. So certain folks have more than others and certain folks are affected
00:49:18.360more than others. And so it's actually a justice issue because even though it's ubiquitous,
00:49:22.960fetuses, people of lower class, which also tend to be of color, are much more affected and carry
00:49:28.020much higher body burdens than others. And so that should help you think, oh, you can actually0.99
00:49:33.580mitigate your body burden with things like money. And you can through certain forms of consumer
00:49:39.960choice. You can choose not to ingest certain types of food that are packaged in plastic or canned
00:49:45.020because cans have plastic linings. And that can reduce your body burden by between probably about
00:49:50.34040 to 60% according to the research of BPA in particular. So there's also other types of things
00:49:56.360that this hasn't been researched on, but the problem is you still got that other 40 to 60%.
00:50:01.400So you can mitigate it, but you can't eliminate it. And because of that, that's another sort of,
00:50:07.600that's another moment to turn upstream. And so it'd be like, you have mopped up your body
00:50:11.380bathtub overflowing metaphor, which has now raged out of control as best as you can time to turn
00:50:17.760off the tap and that's upstream. Yeah. So individual action works to an extent. And I
00:50:24.640don't think it's the extent that you would hope for. So you can do some of that, especially if
00:50:29.500it makes you concerned and that's what you want to spend your time on, but just know that that's
00:50:54.640Speaking of these systemic issues, I'd like to also speak about your work on feminist and anti-colonial methodologies in the natural sciences in your work with the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, or CLEAR, which is a feminist anti-colonial marine science laboratory that studies plastic pollution.
00:51:13.940And when I think about it, methodology remains deeply tangled in respectability and credibility, but arguably we should be centering respect, not respectability. So I'm wondering what protocol has Clear created to keep good relations and respect at the core of your work?
00:51:33.800Well, there are probably literally like a hundred of them.
00:51:39.740Super easy one that is particularly anti-colonial is that we don't do research on indigenous land when we aren't invited.
00:51:47.100It seems super simple, but your average scientist and your average environmentalist, actually, because they are invested in doing good, environmental good, they will go to beaches and clean them up or do research on them.
00:51:59.400they'll go to places that are not their places or that are under Indigenous governance,
00:52:05.620and they'll do research there without permission. But what that does is it swaps out your goods,
00:52:10.620right? So you might be doing a type of environmental good, but you're also reproducing
00:52:14.420colonial entitlement to Indigenous land for settler and colonial goals. So probably not
00:52:19.600what you meant. So you're being accidentally colonial while you're being purposefully
00:52:23.100environmental. So actually not that simple, not to go where you're not invited. It also, again,
00:52:28.980means that we take a long time to do certain research because we won't go certain places
00:52:33.220until we get explicitly invited. So I think it took me four years, maybe three and a half years
00:52:39.200to go to the northern part of the province to Labrador because I had to be invited by Inuit
00:52:43.880before I would go there because it's in Inuit part of the province. But now that's where I do most of
00:52:48.460my work. So that's a very simple protocol. Did you have a different one in mind since you have
00:52:53.880totally read all of my stuff and I can tell because of how you're quoting things to something
00:52:58.220else you want me to talk about in particular? No, I mean, that one is so important. And
00:53:03.280especially to a lot of our listeners, I think, because I'm sure a lot of people listening to
00:53:08.160this podcast, they want to do good. And they want to respect indigenous wishes. And of course,
00:53:14.360those are different everywhere in the world. But how to be allies, how to be supportive
00:53:18.920is really challenging, I think, for people to know that, especially when they haven't been taught
00:53:24.540how to actually be in relationship with the earth and with the people of the land. And
00:53:30.660this is another question about CLEAR, and so that will give us a chance to talk a little bit more
00:53:35.720about it. But I'm wondering if you can share a bit more about the importance of community peer
00:53:40.660review in terms of contextualizing the impact of scientific findings for the local community,
00:53:46.520and perhaps give some examples from your work with CLEAR.
00:53:49.820Right. Okay. So community peer review, I'm just going to take out what that is first,
00:53:53.900And then intuitively, you might know why it's important, but we'll go into that.
00:53:58.020So community peer review means that when we do research that impacts or is from particular
00:54:03.240communities, before we publish results, we go back to the communities where we got samples
00:54:09.100or whatever from, and we say, this is what we did.
01:00:22.760with certain fish since time immemorial is that if we respect them, we can get food.
01:00:29.300And if that doesn't happen, then they'll stop being available for food. And so that's a very
01:00:32.740specific relationship compared to say our vegan lab members, which we have settler white vegan1.00
01:00:38.600feminists who do not have a food agreement or any kind of agreement with the fish. And they're1.00
01:00:44.220thinking mostly about life and death and one being inherently good and one being inherently bad.
01:00:48.260I don't have that relation. So different lab members are going to have different relations,
01:00:54.160different reciprocities, different ideas of respect. It is very important that I do not
01:00:58.740make the settler feminists take on indigenous concepts. That's super rude. It's called1.00
01:01:04.200appropriation and it's pretty colonial. So the trick is how do you, in a lab with a lot of
01:01:09.240diversity, bring people into their accountability to their fish when they're going to have different
01:01:13.340accountabilities and different relationalities. So because we're methodologists, we try and figure
01:01:18.580that out in protocol, which is like the guidelines for hanging out with the fish. So one of them
01:01:23.300that everyone abides by is that you don't wear earbuds like music headphones when you are working
01:01:29.740with the fish. Because no matter what kind of relationship you're supposed to have with the
01:01:33.640fish, it's not respectful to tune someone out while you're dissecting their body. It's a severing
01:01:40.960sort of action as opposed to adjoining action. Also, before you start dissecting, you're supposed
01:01:45.840to take a minute and just think of that fish, where it's from, it's land relations, it's what
01:01:51.760it was up to, and then you start the dissection. We have one lab member who isn't trained in science
01:01:58.760and she'll bring up a picture of the animal on her phone, especially if she doesn't know a lot
01:02:03.060about it. So if we have Atlantic cod versus mackerel or versus Arctic char, she doesn't know
01:02:08.660what those different fish looks like. So she'll bring them up on her phone and keep that picture
01:02:12.400up while she starts her dissection. We don't say you must have this relationship. We say you must
01:02:17.820attend to your relationality and accountability, and you have to work on that. So that's part of
01:02:22.960the protocol for those things. I love it. I really, really love it. And yeah, I mean,
01:02:30.180it's just a whole different way of being and doing. And like I said in my last response,
01:02:37.320I just hope that this type of way of relating can spread to other folks because I think that really part of the biggest foundational issues we are up against and what's causing this disconnection is the way we relate to each other, to more than human kin.
01:02:59.200I mean, although I'm now thinking of the word kin because of what you said at the beginning, so I almost want to like pause on using that word until I think more about it. But yeah, I'm really grateful that that's the way you work.
01:03:11.660And to go on a little bit more into this topic, I'm hearing about the inclusion of traditional ecological knowledge in climate change studies and the natural sciences more and more, which seems like it could be good.
01:03:24.840And on Clear's website, you explicitly state, quote, we do not seek to extract indigenous knowledge to bring it into Western science. That would be a way to give more access to settler and colonial goals, end quote.
01:03:39.660And this feels so incredibly important to name amidst this rush to incorporate TEK in academia. So I'd love if you could share more about this and how Clear is navigating this.
01:03:51.000right so um first of all i think there are really good projects that can bring traditional
01:03:58.740ecological knowledge and traditional knowledge inuit knowledge into various spaces but i also
01:04:05.800think that relationality ethics accountability start from the place you are and where i am
01:04:11.200is in an academic space that has almost no practice doing a good job of that and all around
01:04:18.080me are people with immense appetite to consume Indigenous knowledge, mostly as data and also as
01:04:26.020charisma and also as a chance to get grants on their terms, which is fundamentally colonial.0.61
01:04:31.520If you think of the sort of super fast, dirty definition of colonialism as settler and colonial
01:04:37.200access to Indigenous land, life, life worlds for colonial goals, the incorporation of TEK into
01:04:44.720Western science is almost always colonial, especially where I hang out. I can't speak
01:04:49.640to other places. And so, we just say no. Hells no. And part of the reason I put my foot down in
01:04:57.040such a very concrete way is that when people see, first of all, an indigenous-led lab that says,0.99
01:05:02.840no, we don't do that, they have to be like, whoa, what? They have to take a moment compared to say0.96
01:05:07.320if it was settler-led or if we were predominantly settler. This doesn't mean that there isn't TEK
01:05:13.160that flows through the lab because we've got a bunch of indigenous folks. We've got First Nation
01:05:24.940on indigenous land, because we're using the skills we've learned and the things we know
01:05:28.920at different parts in our life. Of course, there's traditional knowledge flowing through the lab.
01:05:32.140It's just not for public consumption. It is never recorded. That's one of the rules I have.
01:05:37.780So sometimes, for instance, we'll sample in places because, you know, elders tell us to. We don't include that. We don't include that in our documentation. We follow it. We live it. We, you know, we're accountable to it. But that doesn't then circulate outside of that relationship.
01:05:54.520One of the ways that my elder Rick Tavoya talks about this relationship is the reason that you don't film ceremony or things that are sacred or things that are extremely place-based is because it introduces a foreigner into a relationship that's not supposed to have random foreigners drop in by looking at the pictures later on, right?
01:06:13.420Not because something captures your soul, et cetera.
01:06:15.080And so the same thing happens with science is if you start circulating really promiscuously traditional ecological knowledge as data, you've just introduced like everyone in the kitchen sink into a relationship that's not that kind of relationship. So we don't do it. Yeah, those are the sort of values behind that decision.
01:06:32.880I really loved hearing that example. This conversation has been so wonderful. I appreciate your fierce dedication to your work and the way that you interweave these different themes into your studies is so beautiful and such a example for us all that are listening.
01:07:01.260And for those even who aren't listening, I think the way that you're going about this is shaking shit up in the best way.