For The Wild - Dr. MAX LIBOIRON on Reorienting Within a World of Plastic [ENCORE] ⧸294

00:00:00.280 Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today on the show, I'll be speaking with Dr. Max Liboron, an assistant professor in geography at Memorial University, where she directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, also known as CLEAR.

00:00:18.220 CLEAR develops feminist and anti-colonial methodologies and instruments in the natural sciences to study marine plastic pollution.

00:00:26.340 Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastics? Hell no. So recycling is good for

00:00:37.500 ethics. You can be a good citizen. It's better than nothing, but it is not the solution because

00:00:43.480 it actually allows the problem to continue. Dr. Libran has played leading roles in the

00:00:49.480 establishment of the field of discard studies, the social study of waste and wasting, the global 0.85

00:00:55.920 open science hardware movement and as a figure in feminist science studies and justice-oriented

00:01:01.800 citizen science. Max, thank you so much for joining us today. Like I was mentioning earlier

00:01:09.320 before we began our official conversation that this topic I know is really at the forefront of

00:01:17.480 people's minds as we, I think as a collective, learn more about our waste and the issues that

00:01:24.160 comes with that. So thank you so much for being here and for all of the ways that you

00:01:28.160 interweave your work. My pleasure. I want to say that as I was preparing for this interview,

00:01:34.880 I was very much envisioning that our conversation would begin by discussing the pervasiveness of

00:01:41.480 plastic and plastic pollution. But as I read your work, I became really intrigued by your framing

00:01:48.400 of plastic as kin in response to the dominant discourse on plastic. So to begin our conversation,

00:01:55.360 I'm hoping you can share what the plastosphere is and why plastic can no longer solely be

00:02:02.380 understood as an inanimate object and how you arrived at the understanding of plastic as kin.

00:02:09.460 Well, that's a lot of questions in one. Maybe I'll start with the plastosphere because that's

00:02:13.420 pretty straightforward. Plastics, whether they're waste or not, are inextricable parts of living

00:02:19.500 systems. Everything from the fillings in your teeth to your contraceptive devices to parts of

00:02:26.320 your bones. Those are medical things that you do, plastic in your body, to make your body work.

00:02:32.100 We ingest plastics, right? So, plastics are already part of making our bodies work. They're

00:02:36.720 part of making our infrastructures work. They're in highways and airplanes, and they make automobiles

00:02:41.360 safe, right? They're in pacemakers. So they're already inextricable part of systems. But then

00:02:47.180 a few years ago, scientists found that when plastics enter certain types of ecosystems,

00:02:52.460 mostly marine ones, they grow unique, one of a kind, little tiny ecosystems on them. So the

00:03:00.040 bacteria and then the sort of attendant organisms that eat the bacteria and grow around it don't

00:03:06.660 grow in the same combinations anywhere else. And that they chose to call the plastosphere,

00:03:11.360 right? The unique ecosystems that only exist with plastics. This is what makes plastics

00:03:16.060 particularly interesting as a pollutant, although there are other pollutants that do it too,

00:03:19.680 which is that there's not really a simple nature culture divide. There's not really an us and them

00:03:24.340 or it and us or whatever you want to call it. And I remember this when I was on one of my first

00:03:28.960 research voyages is we were out way in the middle of the open ocean. There was nothing anywhere near

00:03:35.260 that you could see above the water. And we came across this floating clump of a buoy with some

00:03:42.640 ropes ensnaled around it. And living around all of this was not only the bacteria and these sorts

00:03:48.620 of things of the plastosphere, but in huge, like I could eat them huge fish, right? So it was acting

00:03:55.540 as what's called a fish aggregator, which is something that provides shade and food for fish.

00:04:01.440 And 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?

00:04:21.600 i personally voted to leave it in but i was vastly outnumbered and outvoted because the

00:04:29.520 other scientists understood their primary and really only goal to get rid of plastics

00:04:34.060 and so they took it out and the fish died and all the things living on it died

00:04:38.140 and so the this idea of annihilation right the band getting rid of straws getting rid of plastics

00:04:44.480 boo plastic in a very complete sort of way is very very strong even with scientists you know

00:04:50.280 across different social movements, across different sectors, as a sort of annihilation

00:04:54.240 relationship. But I think if you do annihilate plastics, just, you know, you can do a thought

00:04:59.400 experiment, you would end up in a B-Hore movie really fast, like our roads would crumble, our

00:05:03.540 airplanes would fall out of the sky, like just things would immediately cease working. 0.96

00:05:08.380 And I'm not saying, yay, plastic, let's plastic it up every plastic chance we plastic get.

00:05:13.280 But there are certain things that plastic is good at, and that we need it for, and certain things

00:05:17.860 that it shouldn't be used for, like packaging. Packaging gets used for a few minutes, and we've

00:05:23.320 turned it into one of the most durable, you've used one of the most durable materials in the

00:05:26.980 world to do it. If I ran a design class, I would fail the student who turned in, you know, the

00:05:31.940 temporary use with the longest lived material combination sort of design idea. So, when people

00:05:37.040 talk about the ubiquity of plastics, they usually mean disposables or single use. Within that, I

00:05:44.620 don't think they usually mean medical waste, which is a very important form of single use.

00:05:48.700 I think they usually mean certain types of consumer waste. And within that, I actually

00:05:52.420 think they mostly mean packaging. So if you want to talk about the annihilation of packaging,

00:05:56.620 that's very, very, very different than talking about the annihilation of plastics.

00:06:01.520 So that's the plastosphere part. The kin part, I am usually pretty hesitant to talk about,

00:06:08.240 mostly because there's a lot of misunderstanding about kinship, particularly in academia,

00:06:13.520 which is where I spend most of my conversations. So there's this like fetishization of kinship that

00:06:18.720 is rampant and well-fed in academia right now. We're like, this is kin and that is kin and

00:06:23.460 chemicals are kin and your left shoe is kin. And it's usually a very colonial and even I would say

00:06:31.000 imperial mindset where you go out and you stick your flag in some kin and you say, that's my kin

00:06:38.820 now. I like whales. Whales are my kin. Mine. The point of kin is that they claim you. You don't

00:06:45.540 claim them. My family has a lot of adoption in it. And so, it's very clear to us, especially if

00:06:53.180 you're going back to try and find your biological family, if that's what you want to get up to,

00:06:56.920 is that that family isn't yours to claim. That family has to claim you. That identity has to

00:07:02.480 claim you if you're actually going to become, sort of expand your family, expand your kinship,

00:07:08.740 right? You don't get to be like you, family, here, now. Also, family and kin isn't inherently good.

00:07:15.120 So, the reason I think plastics are useful to think about kin, if people actually get it right,

00:07:20.700 understand kin isn't like a possessive term, which is often how it's used, 0.97

00:07:24.820 is that, you know, everyone has that asshole uncle, that abusive whatever, right? The abuse 0.99

00:07:29.600 in your family, something like that. So plastics challenge the often fetishized concept of kinship

00:07:36.140 as an inherent set of good relationships, right? They lead you to figure out, okay, how do you do

00:07:41.460 good kinship with bad kin, which I think is a problem that a lot of us have to deal with,

00:07:45.320 with our actual, you know, nuclear and extended families. And so what that would look like with

00:07:49.540 plastic, I think is really important. And annihilation isn't one of them, right? Ostracization

00:07:55.120 and, you know, stepping it out until it's behaved so it can come back in might be part of it.

00:07:59.600 but the annihilation discourse is not in any way kin. So kin introduces a whole new sets of

00:08:04.840 problematics, really, really hard ones. When do you ostracize your kin? When do you not? When do

00:08:10.280 you support them in their trauma and in the sort of bad stuff they're doing? When do you not? These

00:08:15.280 are the problems that I think are more interesting with plastics, but I don't see a lot of people

00:08:18.940 doing that. I see a lot more black and white situations that are not very kinny.

00:08:22.640 yeah i i see what you're saying in terms of plastic not being inherently bad but when we're 0.99

00:08:31.460 using this long-lived material for short disposable subjects so to speak it's stupid actually it's 0.73

00:08:40.920 really not an intelligent way to go about it and uh yeah and i i want to say that i was oh yeah 0.79

00:08:48.080 please. Well, I was going to say it actually is intelligent, just through a different set of

00:08:52.620 intelligences. So I think this is a really important point that a lot of activists don't

00:08:57.540 do. And that's instead of being like, whoa, you know, packaging people are bad and stupid. And 1.00

00:09:03.620 that was stupid. That's stupid design. What you'd say is no, under what conditions does this make 1.00

00:09:07.120 sense? Under what conditions does it make sense to make some of your shortest lived commodity

00:09:11.800 objects like packaging out of our longest lived materials? How does that make sense? Because when

00:09:16.040 you answer that, then you'll know where you have to start working to make the change. 0.89

00:09:20.440 And by and large, the answer to that question, the reason it makes sense is it is so damn

00:09:24.620 cheap because oil and the petrochemical industry, which are the same industry, same as plastics,

00:09:29.740 are so well subsidized and they have so much policy capture that right now, and actually

00:09:37.860 for almost all time, virgin plastic, raw oil sort of feedstock for plastics are cheaper,

00:09:44.500 they're more predictable they're more dependable they're easier to make stuff out of

00:09:48.580 than recycled materials and then alternative materials so of course that's what you make it

00:09:53.520 out of so if you want to make change you can't say like well that's dumb you have to say how

00:09:59.320 does that make sense oh i love being challenged like this thank you for taking that there and

00:10:05.680 yeah no i i completely see your perspective on that and yeah i was thinking about the subsidies

00:10:14.240 or about subsidies in general the other day,

00:10:16.640 I was speaking to a dear friend about reforestation

00:10:20.640 and doing restoration without the use

00:10:23.900 of petrochemical driven machinery.

00:10:27.280 And my friend was saying, well, you know,

00:10:29.860 it would just be so expensive

00:10:30.940 and the labor would be so expensive.

00:10:32.480 I said, well, the other way is so expensive too,

00:10:34.420 but it's subsidized.

00:10:35.460 And that's why we're able to use bulldozers

00:10:39.320 and things like that in our quote unquote

00:10:41.160 restoration methodologies,

00:10:43.440 because it's subsidized. It's not because it's necessarily cheaper than anything else,

00:10:47.280 but it's very interesting to see what gets subsidized and what doesn't and therefore

00:10:51.960 how we're using certain materials or petrochemicals or certain ways of doing things.

00:10:57.800 So thank you for calling that out in this conversation. I think that's a really important

00:11:02.520 angle to see it at or else we're really not going to get anywhere with shifting the way that we do

00:11:07.720 things. So I want to say that I was really struck by something I came across in an interview you

00:11:14.260 gave with Frank News titled Anti-Colonial Science and the Ubiquity of Plastic, where you were quoted

00:11:20.840 as saying, quote, the number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half,

00:11:28.480 but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 1950s. That's

00:11:35.840 living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than

00:11:41.600 totally packaged in plastic, end quote. Bringing in this living memory as a response to plastic

00:11:48.020 pollution is incredibly simple yet really profound. And I would love if you could speak to the history

00:11:54.080 of plastic production in terms of how and why its necessity was manufactured and what the initial

00:12:00.500 response was to the creation of disposability. What is our living memory of plastic?

00:12:08.260 Well, so first of all, the hour in that conversation and this entire conversation

00:12:12.740 is actually extremely fragmented. So the history I'm going to tell is the American history and the

00:12:17.400 dominant consumer society of the US, which is largely white and industrially driven.

00:12:25.140 So, and that is the history of plastic. There's a couple of different histories and there's a lot

00:12:28.860 nuance to this history that I'm just going to skate right over. I mean, there's lots of really

00:12:32.020 good sources out there for more nuance. Basically, plastic comes out of a sort of rising industrial

00:12:36.820 science where one of the values is try things out and see what happens. And if it works,

00:12:41.220 awesome. We can put it towards something. And so there's a lot of, there's different types of

00:12:45.080 plastic. Some of them never really get out of the industrial drawing room. Some of them do.

00:12:50.260 Billiard bowls were one of the first sort of consumer type plastics, sort of a cellulose base.

00:12:55.320 But the problem with that plastic was that it was really unstable.

00:12:58.700 And so sometimes if they got hit really hard, they would explode.

00:13:01.740 Super downside.

00:13:03.380 So they kept working on it.

00:13:05.720 Then there was a couple generations in terms of industrial generations later, there was

00:13:11.480 bakelite, which was a little more stable, but also highly flammable.

00:13:15.320 So there were all these different plastics that were being produced, but they weren't

00:13:18.440 yet really mass produced until the Second World War. 1.00

00:13:22.840 The Second World War helped get some of these kinks out of the system. 1.00

00:13:25.760 So things stopped exploding and melting in the rain and turning to mud and stuff like that. 1.00

00:13:30.020 And so you can think of mass production as being quite enabled by military infrastructures.

00:13:35.680 So the First World War and then the Second World War really helps mature the actual material of plastic.

00:13:41.780 And in between the World Wars in the 30s into the 50s, and after the Second World War,

00:13:47.140 there's this problem where when you have the two World Wars in the United States

00:13:50.860 and in other places in the world, you start having a making-do sort of attitude, right?

00:13:54.580 Like all of your resources are going into the war effort.

00:13:57.520 And so people are saving and skimping and reusing and repairing and all of these sorts

00:14:01.760 of activities that stick around after the wars.

00:14:05.140 And the problem from an industry perspective is that if people are doing that, then they're

00:14:10.260 not actually consuming.

00:14:11.520 They don't need to consume new stuff.

00:14:13.580 And the problem with plastics, because they're durable objects, is that you just need to buy

00:14:18.260 one of that thing, and then it will quite literally last forever. And so, Lloyd Stufer,

00:14:24.420 who is in the packaging industry for modern plastics, said the future of plastics is in

00:14:29.840 the trash can. He said this in the 30s to a huge industry conglomerate sort of conference.

00:14:35.920 And what he meant was, and you can look this up, this is readily available. What he meant was,

00:14:39.880 we need to find ways to move plastics through households, not into households, and then they

00:14:44.260 stay. And so we talked about disposability as the thing that would lead away from these saturated

00:14:51.520 consumer markets and sort of make this giant, beautiful hole where plastics would go into it

00:14:58.500 and people would just throw money right into this nice conveyor belt. And so that was a very

00:15:03.160 strategic effect, strategic plan. But the problem was because society was like making, do repairing

00:15:08.220 and not spending, they had to be taught how to waste. And there was a lot of resistance to it.

00:15:12.860 Susan Strausser's book, Waste and Want, has this very cool thing about, sort of even before the

00:15:17.480 plastic conversation, there used to be tin cups at train stations in the United States, and everyone

00:15:23.160 would drink from the same tin cup. And then with the sanitation movement, they're like, no, no, no,

00:15:27.480 germs, that's how that happens. So we're going to use paper cups. This isn't even plastic yet.

00:15:32.080 And there were riots, specifically soldiers rioting, because they thought that was pretty

00:15:37.520 f'd up this wasteful thing and what were they fighting for anyway there is also problems with

00:15:42.940 a lot of these disposals were sold to housewives to you know make work more efficient for housewives

00:15:49.960 and as part of that packaging was like disposable hygiene for women's menstrual cycles and there

00:15:56.800 are a lot of really funny stories in the archive that don't actually circulate very well about

00:16:01.840 women reusing what were supposed to be disposables and also trying to deal with an infrastructure

00:16:06.820 like toilets and stuff like that that weren't quite used to disposables yet so there's a little

00:16:12.280 bit of a leg in some cases funny funny horrible horrifying stories about being at like your in-laws

00:16:17.680 dinner and you have a tampon and there's nowhere to put it in the bathroom or in that entire floor

00:16:23.500 and so what do you do with it blah blah right these these stories so um disposability that one

00:16:29.660 of the one of the truisms around plastics and waste that that is very well developed at this

00:16:35.360 point, but it's absolutely not true, is that, quote-unquote, humans are inherently wasteful,

00:16:39.780 or we are just like a trashy species that trashes things. Besides the super problematic universal

00:16:45.440 we there that erases very important cultural and historical and political differences,

00:16:50.920 is the problem that actually even the we that you're talking about, like Americans,

00:16:54.440 like white middle-class Americans, not even them, turns out. It was a strategy. It was a plan.

00:16:59.880 It was baked. There was resistance. That resistance was overcome. This is learned

00:17:04.440 behavior and then the infrastructure to support it was put in place so that there weren't actually

00:17:09.000 other infrastructures you could choose from after a while. So if you go to the grocery store right

00:17:13.580 now, especially around here where I live in Newfoundland, I dare you to find any food source

00:17:18.960 that you want that's not packaged. You can't. It's not behavior. It's infrastructure. And that

00:17:23.120 is by design. And that is not by design by what most people mean by quote unquote us, right? People

00:17:28.640 in social movements, people who mean good. I'm also thinking about in this vein, I'd really

00:17:34.360 like to also understand the time scales of plastic, you know, if you could speak to how

00:17:39.540 they change and act over generations. So the problem with answering that is that

00:17:46.640 a lot of it is speculation in models because plastics have been around for a fraction of

00:17:52.200 the time that they're modeled to exist, right? So if plastics last, you know, even a thousand

00:17:57.120 years, which is conservative, they've only been really around since 46, right? 1946 in the way

00:18:03.840 that they are now right and then more modern sort of plastics maybe since the 70s really

00:18:09.500 so that's only 40 years out of like a thousand or ten thousand so in a lot of ways it's hard to tell

00:18:16.640 what we do know is that when they hang out in sunlight or in acidic conditions or in abrasive

00:18:22.680 conditions so like going up and down shorelines in the waves they fragment so because plastics

00:18:29.400 made of really long, strong polymer bonds, right? These super long carbon and hydrogen chains,

00:18:34.780 they're really, really strong bonds. So that molecular bond doesn't really break down.

00:18:40.580 That's why plastics last so long. That's why they're so flexible and so strong, right? All

00:18:44.300 these sorts of things. So when they're in the sun or in acidic or abrasive conditions,

00:18:48.740 they'll fragment, but those polymer bonds will stay intact. So basically it's just

00:18:54.380 fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces while staying completely chemically the same.

00:18:59.400 And those fragments can get so small that they can be the size of nanoparticles, which if you

00:19:04.300 know anyone who works in the nano sort of area, they work really, really hard to make things at

00:19:08.960 that size. And plastic, they'll just get there by their own selves if you leave them in, you know,

00:19:13.380 like on a beach, right, or something like that. And they have very different effects at these

00:19:17.180 different sizes because they hang out in very different ecosystems. So I remember, oh, it must

00:19:22.180 have been 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, reading a study where they found plastic circulating in

00:19:27.300 the gills of fish. And people are like, whoa, that's great. That's so small. Now we know it

00:19:32.860 circulates in the blood of mussels. Oh, that's so small. Now we know it. So just the different

00:19:39.480 sizes mean that they're interacting in very different relationships in ecosystems and in

00:19:44.740 worlds. So when they're bigger, like fishing gear that you can see with your eyes from a distance,

00:19:49.420 they tend to do things like entangle, like whales and turtles and that sort of stuff.

00:19:54.120 when they get really, really, really small, we're actually just researching that now because it's

00:19:58.380 harder to tell what they get up to. So there's a lot of different stuff going on. The other thing

00:20:03.140 is with most of those models, and some of them might have changed by now, but at least from a

00:20:07.880 couple of years ago and earlier, when you see an estimate like, oh, this kind of plastic breaks

00:20:11.920 down in 10,000 years, the way that scientists figured that out was to blast the plastic with

00:20:18.480 all of the things that make it fragment. So bright light, bright UV light, acidic conditions,

00:20:23.660 often using urea, which is the same thing as urine, in like highly vibrating sort of abrasive

00:20:29.500 conditions. And then they would measure how those bonds weakened or flexed, not came apart because

00:20:35.500 they didn't, but weakened and flexed, and then mathematically extrapolated that. Turns out there

00:20:40.340 are very few real world conditions of like brightly lit vibrating jars of pee where you find plastics.

00:20:46.780 Usually they're hanging out in very different environments. So a lot of those estimates are

00:20:50.580 very estimating to the point where I basically just say plastics laugh forever. Let's treat them

00:20:55.800 that way. Let's not be like, well, if it's only 2,000 years, because what if it's 20,000 years?

00:21:01.760 What if it's something else? Because we don't really know, not from an empirical sort of,

00:21:07.420 oh yes, I have watched that plastic degrade. The other thing we don't know a lot about is

00:21:11.140 once those polymers do break into smaller chains, are those smaller chains toxic? What do they get

00:21:17.960 up to? What are they like? We don't have a super good grasp on that. And that includes things for

00:21:22.560 like bioplastics and stuff like that. When they turn into smaller chunks, those smaller chunks

00:21:26.920 are running around now in the blood of muscles and stuff like that. How do they act? We don't really know.

00:21:47.960 drawing upon plastics and deep time i'm thinking about how we're only ever moving pollution not

00:22:04.980 eliminating it and i'd like to explore the fallacy of many proposed solutions that seek

00:22:10.960 to remove plastics especially in relation to marine pollution and you openly discuss how the

00:22:16.680 push to, quote, remove plastics from the ocean is fundamentally misguided in that it ignores how

00:22:22.660 deeply embedded plastics have become in the ecosystem, especially microplastics, which I

00:22:27.660 feel like is something you were just speaking to. So why is it that nearly all technical solutions

00:22:32.740 have failed to address plastic pollution? And is it even possible to have a solution that addresses

00:22:38.640 plastic pollution within our current economy? Yeah, so we're about to make a lot of listeners

00:22:43.720 is kind of sad. And I apologize for that. Hopefully we'll loop around. And so one of the

00:22:50.020 most charismatic examples of this sort of cleanup fallacy is Boyan Slats, the cleanup array,

00:22:56.020 right? Which is basically a big broom net thing that goes through the water and quote unquote

00:23:00.780 cleans plastics. Almost every single scientist, marine biologist I know, everyone I know who is

00:23:06.280 a scientist who's looked at this project has criticized it. First of all, because it doesn't

00:23:10.440 actually get to the more problematic sizes which are the smallest sizes because its net holes are

00:23:14.860 kind of big bigger than five centimeter or millimeters and the vast majority of plastics

00:23:18.660 in the ocean are less than five millimeters it's about the size of a grain of rice but also because

00:23:23.400 it's sort of a plankton killing machine so it really roughs up plankton and it disturbs their

00:23:28.120 flagella and a plankton without flagella ain't no kind of plankton um it just sort of drifts and

00:23:32.320 dies well i mean it was drifting anyway but without flagella it can't eat it can't repel itself

00:23:37.460 There is a lot of concern about it also killing larger animals.

00:23:40.160 And I have seen photos.

00:23:42.220 You're trying to clean up the biggest thing in the world that is full of some of the smallest

00:23:45.040 things in the world.

00:23:46.100 You have a scale problem immediately.

00:23:48.140 I think someone's done the math and it would take like a gazillion billion tankers, all

00:23:51.020 the tankers in the world working full time just to clean up a small fraction of one ocean.

00:23:56.720 These are the scales we're talking about.

00:23:58.380 People have trouble imagining how big the ocean is.

00:24:00.260 It is too big to clean, my friends.

00:24:03.060 And so the solution isn't to hang out downstream after the plastics have been created.

00:24:07.840 It's to go upstream and to turn off the tap.

00:24:10.680 So you already know, and most people already know this, right?

00:24:13.120 If you walk into your bathtub and you're, unbeknownst to you, your bathtub has been

00:24:17.140 running and you have a flood, do you get the mop or do you turn off the tap?

00:24:21.560 I would say the vast majority of you will turn off the tap and then go get the mop.

00:24:25.240 That's exactly what we have to do.

00:24:26.620 If we're just going to sit on the side of the bathtub as it fills with water continuously

00:24:30.460 and mop, you can sort of see the limited benefits of it. Are there some benefits? Sure, absolutely,

00:24:36.800 right? But it's not the primary action that's going to address the problem to scale. And so

00:24:42.220 ceasing the production of plastics, particularly packaging, which accounts for about 30% of

00:24:47.800 plastic, it's almost no matter where you are in the world, roughly 30, that's the solution. And

00:24:52.140 most of, or even all, maybe just most of the people I know who study waste and waste systems

00:24:58.260 always say, hey, if you want to deal with waste, go upstream. Once you got downstream,

00:25:02.880 like it's just there. And you're right. You're absolutely right. You just defer it. You just

00:25:06.860 shuffle it around. You shuffle it into a landfill. Well, that's going to get flooded under climate

00:25:11.620 change. And even if it's 10,000 years, those plastics are going back in the water. Once

00:25:15.580 Boylan Slat's cleanup array gets those plastics, where do they go? They go in landfill. Ocean is

00:25:21.100 downhill from everything. Those plastics will end up back in the ocean. So it's not a coincidence 0.89

00:25:25.820 is that some of the Ocean Cleanup Array's biggest sponsors are the packaging industry

00:25:29.840 because it lets them keep on keeping on with that faucet while they're handing out mops.

00:25:37.180 No, it's really important for us to understand this. And I'm thinking about these upstream ways

00:25:46.940 of turning off the tap, so to speak. And we talked a little bit about oil subsidies earlier.

00:25:52.840 And 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.

00:26:11.620 Yeah, so I would definitely say that oil subsidies are a core area.

00:26:15.500 Divestment from fossil fuels in general would be a core area because of the raw feedstock

00:26:20.400 of climate change and the raw feedstock of plastics.

00:26:23.100 Turns out it's the same feedstock.

00:26:24.420 How weird, right?

00:26:25.820 So you actually get to do a lot of work with one set of targets.

00:26:29.100 I don't know how to deal with subsidies, right?

00:26:31.900 I mean, there are limits to my areas of expertise.

00:26:34.060 I have many areas of expertise, but they do not go all the way to governance, state governance.

00:26:39.200 But I do know that it's collective.

00:26:40.700 Right. Because that's that's always true that action action is about reaching across difference and and scaling up, as it were, out of consumerism and into citizenship, into coalitions, into other things like that.

00:26:54.540 yeah and and i'm a big believer of going where it's feasible so instead of trying to convince

00:26:59.940 people who you will never convince going for infrastructure and going for people who already

00:27:05.180 value or believe what you do those are some of just the basic tenets of of effective activism

00:27:09.720 i didn't come up with those but yeah so i work a lot with the province of newfoundland and labrador

00:27:15.900 when it comes to this sort of stuff yeah yeah i think back to a mentor of mine joanna macy who

00:27:23.680 talks about systems theories. And I remember in one of her workshops that I took years ago,

00:27:29.260 and she was saying something like, don't go to the CEO of ExxonMobil to begin with. Start with

00:27:37.140 your community. Start with the people who are on the fence. And I think that preaching to the choir

00:27:43.740 or preaching to people that are interested in the choir actually is really powerful because the

00:27:48.960 choir needs attention and the choir needs organization. And we all can start somewhere

00:27:53.840 and it doesn't need to be starting with the thing that seems the most difficult or trying to

00:27:59.580 convince somebody who is so deep in creation. So I'm with you there. And I want to go back to

00:28:06.900 something we were talking about with the polymers and the chemicals that were being leached. And I

00:28:12.920 understand that plastic isn't necessarily the problem. It is the polymers that decay and that

00:28:18.340 leach the chemicals and by recognizing this we can understand that plastic isn't inherently evil

00:28:24.300 although I know there are times that I have definitely thought that and probably people

00:28:28.320 listening have also felt that so I get you but I'm wondering how does this thinking inform

00:28:34.500 what you've referenced to as a local plastic economy and what might our consumption look like

00:28:41.720 if we had to be responsible for the byproducts of plastic production and maybe a third part to that

00:28:47.960 question, and I can re-ask it if it feels like too much at once, but where and how does plastic

00:28:53.600 make sense? Yeah, it's a pretty big question, and I certainly can't and shouldn't provide a

00:28:59.540 universal answer to that. I think that'd be very unethical and also incorrect. It just wouldn't be

00:29:03.660 correct. So maybe I'll just take an example, a sort of parable, and then maybe we can work through

00:29:09.360 that. So if you take seriously this sort of material flows idea, like you're proposing,

00:29:19.060 so the lab that I run, the plastic pollution lab I run, there are a few things that we don't do

00:29:24.820 because of this material flow problem that you've identified, right? What if you're responsible for

00:29:28.780 your own waste? So we've started thinking about in our anticolonial science, this assumed access

00:29:34.060 to indigenous land to put your waste in, including scientific waste when you're doing plastic

00:29:38.740 pollution research. One form of this waste are plastic gloves, which we go through a lot of,

00:29:44.260 latex gloves. Another is KOH, potassium hydroxide, which is a chemical you use to dissolve

00:29:50.380 tissues and stuff so that you can get to the plastic. So if you want to study, say, muscles

00:29:54.460 or clams or these bivalves, you can't really dissect the belly of a bivalve because it doesn't

00:29:59.920 have a belly. So what you do is you take out everything inside of it and then you dissolve

00:30:03.880 it in KOH. KOH is very toxic. And so where does that go? It goes onto indigenous land to be

00:30:11.200 neutralized. So as a lab, we decided to not do that anymore, not assume access to land outside

00:30:17.980 the lab for our waste, that kind of waste. And the result for that is that we don't use plastic

00:30:23.780 gloves for some really truly disgusting work because we mostly look in the guts of animals

00:30:28.780 for plastics with one exception. We put them on when we work with seal because you can get

00:30:33.700 something called seal finger from seal blood, which is when you have a cut in your finger and

00:30:37.440 the blood gets in and then it paralyzes you. So that's not good. So we will use gloves with seal,

00:30:43.800 but not other things. And that means you have to hang out with some super, super gross things like

00:30:47.820 super decayed cod guts that are full of poop because guts end in your poop chute. Spoiler. 0.73

00:30:53.680 So we work with poo and partially digested stuff. And so we get in there with our fingernails

00:30:58.580 and that is gross, but that is also our commitment and grossness versus colonialism.

00:31:04.760 When you wait out, we're going to stick with grossness. For KOH, what that means is we do

00:31:11.700 not study bivalves. So we don't use KOH. It means our work takes way longer than our peers, which

00:31:17.760 means it takes us longer to publish because not using KOH means you're using your eyeballs

00:31:21.980 and eyeballs are just much slower when there's a bunch of gunk around them. It also means we will

00:31:27.320 never study bivalves. I mean, we can't do it. So when people say, hey, why don't you extend this

00:31:32.800 to shellfish, which are also important here, we're like, well, we don't have a process that

00:31:37.340 we think is just to study that. And so we will not study that. So there's always this rhetoric

00:31:43.520 of like, oh, well, you have to have your cake and eat it too. Like if you want to get rid of fossil

00:31:47.180 fuels, how will you have your cell phone? Well, maybe we won't. Or maybe it will be one cell

00:31:51.340 phone per 50 people and you got to share. Or maybe, you know, the cell phones aren't disposable

00:31:55.900 anymore so this we do science we do science just fine without very many plastic gloves and without

00:32:00.940 koh in fact we're leading scientists in our field and our science is better in which i mean more

00:32:06.960 ethical because we've made those swap outs but we still have plastics in the lab right sometimes

00:32:13.220 when we don't have other other choices we're still also working on what to do instead of latex gloves

00:32:17.760 that yeah are feasible so always moving on that does that sort of get towards your question yeah

00:32:24.340 I feel like that gets to what our consumption would look like if we are responsible for

00:32:30.160 those byproducts.

00:32:31.340 And I'm wondering, does that also tie into the local plastic economy?

00:32:37.120 I was interested in that as well and wondering if you could speak to that too.

00:32:42.020 Well, currently, I don't think there's such a thing as a local plastic economy because

00:32:46.440 the plastic manufacturers are like the DuPonts and the Exxon, they're huge, huge, huge

00:32:52.500 conglomerates.

00:32:53.860 So it would be an exercise in imagining a local plastic economy.

00:32:58.120 And chances are excellent that there wouldn't be much of one because the economy that requires

00:33:03.820 plastic right now, which is usually what starts with extraction, oil and natural gas extraction,

00:33:08.960 goes into fracking towers, or sorry, cracking towers, not fracking towers.

00:33:13.100 Fracking is part of the extraction.

00:33:15.640 Cracking towers, these are not local instruments.

00:33:20.420 So Newfoundland, where I live, the island of Newfoundland and Labrador, there is offshore

00:33:24.760 oil here.

00:33:25.740 That oil doesn't stay here.

00:33:26.900 It goes far, far away to be processed.

00:33:29.260 And then we get plastic shipped back in.

00:33:31.440 I don't think that could be called the local economy because you can't even track it.

00:33:35.320 So the local plastic economy is an exercise in imagination.

00:33:38.840 It is not a thing at the moment.

00:33:42.060 And maybe it wouldn't be, at least for disposable plastics.

00:33:45.620 I mean, I could imagine the more local we become, the less we would need the disposable plastics.

00:33:53.120 I do think what you were saying about there are certain plastics that are, I don't know, I don't want to use the word necessary, but are helpful.

00:34:02.200 And so to not put all plastics in the same category is bad or we should get rid of altogether.

00:34:08.580 Yeah. So for instance, I use the example of pacemakers a lot.

00:34:11.460 So in all my many years of researching marine plastics, I have never found a pacemaker on

00:34:15.920 a shoreline or in a seal.

00:34:18.380 That tends not to be what I find, right?

00:34:21.000 There are other, they're not to scale.

00:34:23.100 They don't, they don't quote unquote leak out of infrastructure as easily.

00:34:26.660 These pacemakers, you don't like lose your pacemaker very easily.

00:34:30.100 There's definitely different, potentially proper places for plastics, but I definitely

00:34:35.300 think packaging is not generally one of them.

00:34:37.420 And the reason that packaging is useful is that it extends the shelf life of food.

00:34:46.240 So if you don't have plastic, then you don't have these massive global food economies.

00:34:50.160 Is that a bad thing?

00:34:51.700 Do we need a global food economy?

00:34:54.820 Maybe not certainly to the extent that we have it now because we have lived, again,

00:34:59.400 in living memory without the kind of global food economy we have now.

00:35:02.680 Yes, yes.

00:35:03.440 I'm so happy you spoke to that because that's what I was trying to get at with this local

00:35:08.080 plastic economy.

00:35:09.100 If we are eating more locally, we would need to preserve food as long as it takes to ship

00:35:15.280 something all the way from, say, Indonesia into our local co-op in California, for instance. 0.77

00:35:21.100 So yeah, I'm totally with you there.

00:35:23.360 And I'd also like to discuss the feasibility of recycling and where our recyclables are

00:35:30.120 even going at this point.

00:35:31.620 And I know many people are totally skeptical of the recycling industry, especially given that out of the 15 to 30 percent of recyclables that are retrieved in the U.S., approximately half are buried or burned due to contamination and market fluctuations.

00:35:48.300 But I'm not even sure how many of us are actually aware of why recycling isn't working or what's happening to what we are disposing of.

00:36:00.280 So I'm wondering, is it failing because of lack of participation or the materiality of our products?

00:36:08.840 I would say neither of those two things in the biggest category.

00:36:15.300 So if you're interested in this question, I highly, highly, highly recommend Samantha McBride's book called Recycling Reconsidered.

00:36:21.900 Samantha McBride is brilliant.

00:36:23.640 She is also the research head honcho at the New York City Department of Sanitation.

00:36:27.920 So what she says lands in a very real way into infrastructure.

00:36:32.500 So first of all, different materials get recycled or are more or less recyclable.

00:36:38.320 So aluminum, for example, is very recyclable because it's very, very expensive and time

00:36:43.800 consuming to mine bauxite, which is the ore for aluminum.

00:36:47.760 And so that's why you'll see people who waste, informal waste pickers who are professional

00:36:53.340 waste pickers, they'll often go for metal and aluminum before they'll go for other stuff,

00:36:58.180 right? That might be where they specialize. And the reason is there's usually a market for

00:37:01.520 aluminum, right? You can actually make money off it. Paper, not so much. Glass, hell's no. Glass

00:37:07.120 is heavy, it's easy to make, and it breaks all the time. So, there's almost never a market for

00:37:12.240 glass. Plastics, which is my wheelhouse, is a hot mess because actually there's no such thing as

00:37:19.080 plastic in the singular there are plastics and there are many many types and they have many many

00:37:24.500 many many many many many many many plasticizers or monomers added to them and then there's

00:37:30.040 different methods for making the plastic so if you take like pet if you extrude it versus whether

00:37:35.760 you blow mold it actually means it has to get recycled differently if it has this plasticizer

00:37:40.000 versus that plasticizer it means it has a different melting temperature which means you

00:37:43.060 have to recycle it differently and sometimes you can't tell what that is because those are

00:37:46.860 proprietary blends. So when you get a whole pile of plastic, it will melt at different temperatures

00:37:53.580 and turn into an amorphous blob that you cannot do a whole lot with. And because the raw feedstock

00:38:00.440 of plastics, oil, natural gas are heavily subsidized. It is almost always less expensive

00:38:06.920 to buy raw feedstock than to use recyclables. So there is that. The thing about recycling,

00:38:15.340 My number one problem with recycling is that the way it's been greened, and by the way,

00:38:19.620 it was greened almost entirely by the container industry.

00:38:23.200 So the recycling symbol was commissioned by the Container Corporation of America, which

00:38:26.960 was a paperboard company in 1970.

00:38:29.940 And you'll see things like when municipal, especially large urban municipalities like

00:38:34.500 New York City or something like that, when their recycling programs are imperiled, the

00:38:38.780 people who buy them out are usually the container plastics and cardboard industries.

00:38:43.320 the thing about recycling and the way it's been greened is that there's a way out of the problem

00:38:49.660 of disposability that is green that is called recycling right so before the reason that

00:38:55.600 recycling became so popular in the 70s the way it was promoted through keep america beautiful etc

00:38:59.680 is because these disposables largely beverage containers started showing up in places they

00:39:05.100 weren't supposed to like in ditches and in farmer's field and in cow stomachs which were harming the

00:39:09.740 cows. And there's a lot of outrage around this, especially in the American sort of prairie area.

00:39:15.160 And so, recycling was one way to deal with this problem, keep America beautiful, and sort of

00:39:19.580 talking about litter and saying this isn't an industrial problem, this is a human behavior

00:39:23.540 problem. And then also, don't worry, we've saved you with recycling, was a two-pronged fork. What's

00:39:29.000 a two-pronged fork? I guess it's a meat fork. A meat fork method to deal with the problem of

00:39:34.680 disposability without endangering disposability. Again, because it was the way to stop saturating

00:39:39.920 markets by moving things through households instead of into them. So, recycling is a very

00:39:45.480 big part of that master plan. Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastics?

00:39:53.520 Hell no. I know Samantha McBride also recycles and she would say the same thing. So, recycling

00:39:59.120 is good for ethics. You can be a good citizen. It's better than nothing, but it is not the

00:40:04.780 solution because it actually allows the problem to continue. It allows that tap to keep going,

00:40:09.000 that bathtub tap to keep going. It gives you some mops.

00:40:12.200 Right. The way that recycling is marketed by industry is a tool that creates this social

00:40:18.740 license to waste more because we feel like, oh, well, we can just recycle it. But I'm really

00:40:25.780 happy that you're speaking to this, because I know that a lot of people that I hear from,

00:40:31.360 especially environmentalists or activists, kind of have come to this feeling of defeat in the

00:40:39.820 sense of, well, you know, China isn't even buying our recycling anymore. Like, what's the point of

00:40:44.240 recycling? We can't really recycle, you know, we can't even send it anywhere. So let's just throw

00:40:51.180 everything in the trash. It's a waste of time. So I definitely feel this type of defeatism when

00:40:58.060 it comes to recycling. And then scaling out even further, it also feels important to acknowledge

00:41:02.980 that waste more broadly in that our garbage or municipal solid waste makes up less than 3%

00:41:10.060 of total waste with the remaining 97% being made up of industrial solid waste. So I'm wondering

00:41:17.120 also how is the waste of today different than previous generations and how can we address

00:41:22.640 industrial waste given the tremendous impact it has you know i and i guess i'm thinking too when

00:41:28.200 we're trying to think of our ethics on recycling or our own individual waste but knowing that like

00:41:34.040 i was saying 97 is of this industrial solid waste that many of us probably have no control over i

00:41:41.440 I mean, maybe we do in some indirect ways.

00:41:45.640 Yeah.

00:41:46.160 So first of all, that 93 or 97, 3% stat, I've written on it before.

00:41:50.360 It's a super sketchy stat because the 97 is self-reported industry.

00:41:55.060 And a lot of that stuff doesn't move into a place where it can be scrutinized or tested.

00:42:00.760 So it's a super shaky number.

00:42:02.440 Also, a lot of that is mining waste, like mining tailings, which are super heavy and

00:42:05.920 wet, agricultural waste, including sometimes runoff.

00:42:09.920 So it's a sketchy number, but like what I say, it's an imprecise number.

00:42:14.840 However, it's a very telling number because even if let's say it's like 80-20, it still

00:42:19.580 has the same flavor, right?

00:42:22.760 Yeah.

00:42:23.180 So folks who work on mining are actually working on waste.

00:42:28.420 People who work in the food movement are actually working on waste.

00:42:31.400 People who work on extraction industries and climate change are actually working on waste.

00:42:35.400 People who work on clothing and textile issues and fast fashion are actually working on waste.

00:42:40.680 So the good news is most of us are already working on waste by targeting these larger

00:42:45.720 industrial, large-scale systems.

00:42:48.760 One of the cool things that happens is, so if you go back to, say, recycling and how

00:42:54.780 do we scale this sort of stuff, there's a very cool group called GAIA, Global Alternatives

00:43:00.360 Against Incinerator Alliance.

00:43:02.440 I might have gotten that wrong, but those words are all in there.

00:43:04.940 They do what's called brand audits when they deal with waste on their shorelines, plastic waste on their shorelines.

00:43:10.980 So, instead of saying like, so 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.

00:43:22.960 They say, we found this many Coca-Cola products, this many Unilever products, and because of their accountability metrics.

00:43:30.500 So 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, you know, a piece of trash or something that comes out, we know there's this huge infrastructure behind it.

00:43:44.540 And we can try and evoke that by following it back up the pipe the way that these brand audits do.

00:43:49.440 So when Gaia does these press releases, they don't say, we have found so many more film plastics and other types of plastics.

00:43:54.780 they say the number one polluter on Philippine coastlines is Coca-Cola for the third year in the

00:44:00.060 row. Coca-Cola, what are you going to do about this? Right? So there are ways to bridge these

00:44:04.660 scales. There are techniques to bridge these scales, even without going and looking in the

00:44:09.460 backyard of Coca-Cola, which doesn't exist, to see what its sort of waste properties are.

00:44:15.420 And that's all you can do. One of the things that I talked to a lot of young activists about is not

00:44:19.480 to do violence against yourself about how you can't do things that are literally impossible.

00:44:23.360 you should release that you should release that to the universe and not feel guilty for things

00:44:28.440 that are quite literally impossible and then adjacent to that systems of power are not very

00:44:34.460 faithful in reproducing themselves actually so capitalism for instance DuPont something like

00:44:40.580 that they're invested in their own longevity and maintaining themselves but in the processes where

00:44:44.780 they do that it's not like every time they do something it works perfectly and it's and it's

00:44:49.920 even and smooth, and all you can do is throw your soft little body against the monolith.

00:44:54.060 They actually reproduce things really unfaithfully. So some of the most success I've had

00:44:58.440 in activism is when I've talked to former DuPont scientists who go into science, go into chemistry,

00:45:04.660 because they mean to do good. They want to make the world better, and they end up working for

00:45:08.200 DuPont. They are the quote-unquote bad guys that people think are monolith, but actually they're

00:45:12.660 leaving behind these trails, especially when they retire, when they put things in archives,

00:45:17.820 They're making these sort of chinches and armor.

00:45:20.760 They're unfaithful reproducers of the system that they're part of, and that leaves spaces.

00:45:26.020 There's an artist that looks at this for military waste, I believe.

00:45:29.420 He's trying to find military installations, black sites, and he does this by looking for

00:45:32.920 the unfaithful parts where they try and reproduce secrecy, but they can't because they have 0.99

00:45:36.960 to put their poo somewhere. 0.70

00:45:38.480 And so when they ship out their sewage, he tracks that, and that tells him where the 0.64

00:45:43.220 military bases are.

00:45:44.180 So this is just an example of how these systems are reproducing themselves in really patchy, uneven ways. And you can find those little bits and work on them there in various ways, just to sort of help with the despair situation that might be happening at this point in the podcast.

00:46:00.360 No, it's good to have these silver linings or these ways that we can be subversive and yeah, just find the fissures in the system that we can snake up and find ways of breaking this chain.

00:46:17.220 And I do want to ask another question that also may feel a bit heavy, but I think is

00:46:22.860 extremely important to discuss.

00:46:25.300 So to transition the conversation, I want to talk about the amount of plastic in our

00:46:30.120 bodies and the nuances in defining pollution and harm and how alarmed we should be in terms

00:46:36.440 of plasticizers as endocrine disruptors.

00:46:40.200 Now, I think many of us are familiar with the various studies showing that humans all

00:46:44.220 over the world, regardless of their personal plastic use, contain chemicals that originate

00:46:49.880 from plastic, chemicals which correlate to infertility, miscarriage, reduced brain development,

00:46:56.900 obesity, diabetes, cancer, and neurological disorders. Now, these statistics are obviously

00:47:03.540 extremely alarming, but I'm wondering, are we justified in our panic? And if so,

00:47:09.300 is there anything that can be done to remediate plastic from our bodies?

00:47:14.220 So first of all, I'll say I never prefer panic because it's really uncoordinated. It doesn't get a lot of stuff done. So concern, yes, but hopefully slightly more coordinated concern. So yeah, I'm concerned about the amount of plasticizers and industrial chemicals in general, including ones that aren't plasticizers that are in bodies. They're in all bodies tested. It's ubiquitous, but very uneven. So certain folks have more than others, and certain folks are affected more than others.

00:47:39.760 And so it's actually a justice issue, because even though it's ubiquitous, fetuses, people

00:47:44.100 of lower class, which also tend to be of color, are much more affected and carry much higher

00:47:48.380 body burdens than others.

00:47:50.360 And so that should help you think, oh, you can actually mitigate your body burden with

00:47:55.720 things like money.

00:47:57.380 And you can.

00:47:58.340 Through certain forms of consumer choice, you can choose not to ingest certain types

00:48:03.020 of food that are packaged in plastic or canned, because cans have plastic linings.

00:48:06.900 and that can reduce your body burden by between probably about 40 to 60 percent according to the

00:48:12.440 research of bpa in particular so there's also other types of things that this hasn't been

00:48:17.160 researched on but the problem is you still got that other 40 to 60 percent so you can mitigate

00:48:23.680 it but you can't eliminate it and because of that that's another sort of that's another moment to

00:48:28.440 turn upstream instead of being like you have mopped up your body bathtub overflowing metaphor

00:48:33.360 which has now raged out of control as best as you can, time to turn off the tap. And that's

00:48:39.020 upstream. Yeah. So individual action works to an extent, and I don't think it's the extent that

00:48:46.040 you would hope for. So, you know, you can do some of that, especially if it makes you concerned and

00:48:50.540 that's what you want to spend your time on, but just know that that's not turning off the tap.

00:49:03.360 Speaking of these systemic issues, I'd like to also speak about your work on feminist and

00:49:21.580 anti-colonial methodologies in the natural sciences in your work with the Civic Laboratory

00:49:26.080 for Environmental Action Research, or CLEAR, which is a feminist anti-colonial marine science

00:49:31.960 laboratory that studies plastic pollution. And when I think about it, methodology remains

00:49:37.300 deeply tangled in respectability and credibility, but arguably we should be centering respect,

00:49:44.880 not respectability. So I'm wondering what protocol has Clear created to keep good relations and

00:49:51.200 respect at the core of your work? Well, there are probably literally like a hundred of them.

00:49:55.900 So, maybe I will just pick one. Super easy one that is particularly anti-colonial is that we don't do research on indigenous land when we aren't invited. 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.

00:50:19.380 they'll go to places that are not their places or that are under Indigenous governance,

00:50:25.580 and they'll do research there without permission. But what that does is it swaps out your goods,

00:50:30.600 right? So you might be doing a type of environmental good, but you're also reproducing

00:50:34.380 colonial entitlement to Indigenous land for settler and colonial goals. So probably not

00:50:39.580 what you meant. So you're being accidentally colonial while you're being purposefully

00:50:43.060 environmental. So actually not that simple, not to go where you're not invited. It also,

00:50:48.680 again, means that we take a long time to do certain research because we won't go certain

00:50:52.880 places until we get explicitly invited. So, I think it took me four years, maybe three and a

00:50:58.640 half years to go to the northern part of the province to Labrador because I had to be invited

00:51:02.820 by Inuit before I would go there because it's an Inuit part of the province. But now that's where

00:51:08.020 I do most of my work. So, that's a very simple protocol. Did you have a different one in mind

00:51:13.060 since you have totally read all of my stuff and I can tell because of how you're quoting things

00:51:17.480 something else you want me to talk about in particular?

00:51:20.040 No, I mean, that one is so important. And especially to a lot of our listeners, I think,

00:51:25.560 because I'm sure a lot of people listening to this podcast, they want to do good. And they

00:51:30.960 want to respect indigenous wishes. And of course, those are different everywhere in the world. But

00:51:36.100 how to be allies, how to be supportive, is really challenging, I think, for people to know that,

00:51:42.820 especially when they haven't been taught how to actually be in relationship with the earth and

00:51:47.900 with the people of the land. And this is another question about CLEAR, and so that will give us a

00:51:54.780 chance to talk a little bit more about it. But I'm wondering if you can share a bit more about

00:51:59.000 the importance of community peer review in terms of contextualizing the impact of scientific findings

00:52:04.500 for the local community, and perhaps give some examples from your work with CLEAR.

00:52:09.200 Right. Okay. So community peer review, I'm just going to take out what that is first. And then intuitively, you might know why it's important, but we'll go into that. So community peer review means that when we do research that impacts or is from particular communities, before we publish results, we go back to the communities where we got samples or whatever from, and we say, this is what we did. This is why we did it. That's what we found. What do you think?

00:52:36.380 And implicit in that is also, can we please publish this?

00:52:39.980 Which is what academic peer review is, but we've just switched the peers out, right?

00:52:43.580 To be community members.

00:52:45.660 And there are a lot of different values that underpin this and a lot of different benefits.

00:52:52.000 And we don't do it because of the benefits.

00:52:53.740 We do it because of the values.

00:52:55.640 The first value is community self-determination to how they want to be represented.

00:53:00.680 um so some of these communities are rural um often very poor communities that depend on fish

00:53:09.060 and the things we research and look in plastics for for life and livelihood um increasingly these

00:53:14.540 are indigenous communities mostly inuit mostly in nazi avut uh in northern labrador but also

00:53:20.140 and so when we when we do this with them what we're saying is like we're visitors here even if

00:53:27.420 we're also Indigenous? And what do you think of this? Is it valid? And can we circulate this in

00:53:35.780 the way that we have understood it? Because maybe we will do harm. And we can't know that kind of

00:53:41.360 harm, right? We can't understand whether it's going to cause harm or not. Only they can tell us that

00:53:45.900 because we don't live there and we're not from that community. And even if we have a single

00:53:50.060 member from the community, they can't speak for the entire community. So we'll go to them and make

00:53:55.560 sure that we're not causing harm but one of the other benefits is that often that they will really

00:53:59.740 nuance our thinking because again we're not from there and they'll be like oh by the way um that

00:54:04.740 part is wrong or have you thought about that or next time you should do this because that builds

00:54:08.820 on this you know and so um in the course of that that's how we get our research questions the

00:54:14.180 species we study are because of what people bring up and what people are worried about what they eat

00:54:19.520 what they think are important um how we study where we study oh you should go check over there

00:54:24.680 because that's where the old dump was.

00:54:26.440 Oh, we didn't know that.

00:54:27.400 We're going to go check over there.

00:54:29.360 And then they, so it's also a form of validation.

00:54:32.200 It means our work is automatically more meaningful

00:54:34.800 because it touches the ground of where these people live.

00:54:38.860 And yeah, so those are some of the basic values

00:54:44.020 and benefits of community peer review.

00:54:45.580 It's also cool.

00:54:46.400 It's also fun.

00:54:47.740 It's also challenging in ways that are,

00:54:49.900 I think, really important for scientists

00:54:51.580 to realize that they're not autonomous geniuses.

00:54:54.680 and that everything they know is like the entire truth.

00:54:57.980 But in fact, there are other truths and other forms of expertise

00:55:00.580 that can actually validly challenge you and your science.

00:55:04.760 Yeah.

00:55:05.840 Max, so wonderful.

00:55:08.180 And I love that you do that.

00:55:10.660 I mean, I would feel so much differently about science overall

00:55:15.100 as a way of studying if more people did this.

00:55:21.540 I think that's one of the parts about scientific study that really frustrates me at time is just the lack of community engagement and just relationship building.

00:55:35.020 And I really hear you and that when the community gives you feedback, the amount of expansion that can happen, although challenging, maybe it makes the project take longer or maybe it, you know, shifts the area of focus is extremely important.

00:55:52.820 And I know even for this reforestation project I've been working on, I've had community and indigenous consultation on it. And there have been times that I'm like, oh, my gosh, like I've had to restructure almost everything based off those consultations. And in some ways, my ego might be a little frustrated or like, oh, my gosh, like, oh, no, I thought I had the right idea.

00:56:14.120 I thought what I was doing was really good or whatever I thought about what I was doing.

00:56:19.220 But overall, when I take that information in, the way that I can work in the world is

00:56:24.860 so much more potent, caring, regenerative, like actually being a good ally.

00:56:30.240 I mean, like the list goes on and on.

00:56:31.920 And so I respect you and all of your coworkers so much for having that type of mindset.

00:56:37.600 And I feel like you all are, yeah, kind of at the forefront of doing work in this way, because I think it's so rare and very unique. And I hope that people in your field become really inspired by what you're doing, because yeah, I think it needs to spread and more people need to be doing it.

00:56:58.180 And I've read how in practicing this anti-colonial science that you don't get to be separate from the relation that you're necessarily dissecting and they're not merely an object.

00:57:12.280 And so I'm wondering how have members of CLEAR oriented themselves to this idea and how are you choosing to foster a relationship with the fish or bird or whatever you might be dissecting and what models are required to do so?

00:57:25.540 okay so that's a really good and complex question and the answer is there's not a single way

00:57:32.660 so something that's really important about accountability relationality respect is that

00:57:38.900 it's not actually the same it's not always the same when people who aren't indigenous here

00:57:43.140 indigenous people say all our relations i think sometimes people imagine this like forever web

00:57:48.740 that just starts with you and just goes and goes and goes and goes and goes and goes through

00:57:52.580 everything and everything is connected and oh my god but um it's not that smooth it's not like a

00:57:57.940 universal highway that connects everything it's actually very uneven so one of the things i talk

00:58:02.940 about with clear members as we're sort of figuring out how do you relate to the fish you're about to

00:58:07.360 dissect or this fish part you're about to look in for plastics is talking about how people are

00:58:12.240 differently accountable to this so most people actually know that you are not accountable to

00:58:16.600 all your relations the same you're not accountable to your grandmother the same way you're accountable

00:58:20.440 to your mail carrier, even though you have relations with both. You're not accountable

00:58:24.520 to your child the same way you're accountable to your spouse, nor do you want to be, right?

00:58:28.800 Respect and relationality look different there. So we talk about that lesson and then we bring it

00:58:34.380 to the lab member in front of the fish that they're about to look in for plastics.

00:58:38.920 So Métis Nation, where I'm from, has actually an agreement with certain fish since time memorial,

00:58:45.180 is that if we respect them, we can get food.

00:58:49.200 And if that doesn't happen,

00:58:50.100 then they'll stop being available for food.

00:58:52.160 And so that's a very specific relationship

00:58:53.760 compared to say our vegan lab members, 1.00

00:58:56.640 which we have settler white vegan feminists 1.00

00:58:59.340 who do not have a food agreement 1.00

00:59:01.600 or any kind of agreement with the fish.

00:59:03.800 And they're thinking mostly about life and death

00:59:06.160 and one being inherently good

00:59:07.180 and one being inherently bad.

00:59:08.500 I don't have that relation.

00:59:10.360 So different lab members

00:59:11.700 are going to have different relations,

00:59:14.120 different reciprocities, 0.99

00:59:15.020 different ideas of respect, it is very important that I do not make the settler feminists take on

00:59:21.660 indigenous concepts. That's super rude. It's called appropriation and it's pretty colonial. 1.00

00:59:26.420 So the trick is how do you, in a lab with a lot of diversity, bring people into their

00:59:31.380 accountability to their fish when they're going to have different accountabilities and different

00:59:34.540 relationalities? So because we're methodologists, we try and figure that out in protocol, which is

00:59:40.320 the guidelines for hanging out with the fish. So one of them that everyone abides by is that

00:59:45.720 you don't wear earbuds, like music headphones, when you are working with the fish. Because no

00:59:51.100 matter what kind of relationship you're supposed to have with the fish, it's not respectful to

00:59:55.200 tune someone out while you're dissecting their body. It's a severing sort of action as opposed

01:00:02.000 to a joining action. Also, before you start dissecting, you're supposed to take a minute

01:00:06.440 and just think of that fish, where it's from, its land relations, what it was up to,

01:00:12.940 and then you start the dissection. We have one lab member who isn't trained in science,

01:00:19.020 and she'll bring up a picture of the animal on her phone, especially if she doesn't know a lot

01:00:23.040 about it. So if we have Atlantic cod versus mackerel or versus Arctic char, she doesn't know

01:00:28.640 what those different fish looks like. So she'll bring them up on her phone and keep that picture

01:00:32.380 up while she starts her dissection. We don't say you must have this relationship. We say you must

01:00:37.780 attend to your relationality and accountability, and you have to work on that. So that's part of

01:00:42.940 the protocol for those things. I love it. I really, really love it. And yeah, I mean,

01:00:50.160 it's just a whole different way of being and doing. And like I said in my last response,

01:00:57.280 I 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.

01:01:19.180 And I mean, although I'm now thinking of the word kin because of what you said at the beginning.

01:01:23.480 So I almost want to like pause on using that word until I think more about it.

01:01:27.680 But yeah, I'm really grateful that that's the way you work.

01:01:31.640 And 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.

01:01:44.820 And 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.

01:01:59.560 And 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.

01:02:10.960 right so um first of all i think there are really good projects that can bring traditional

01:02:18.700 ecological knowledge and traditional knowledge inuit knowledge into various spaces but i also

01:02:25.780 think that relationality ethics accountability start from the place you are and where i am

01:02:31.160 is in an academic space that has almost no practice doing a good job of that and all around

01:02:38.060 me are people with immense appetite to consume Indigenous knowledge, mostly as data and also as

01:02:45.980 charisma and also as a chance to get grants on their terms, which is fundamentally colonial. 0.61

01:02:51.760 If you think of the sort of super fast, dirty definition of colonialism as settler and colonial

01:02:57.160 access to Indigenous land, life, life worlds for colonial goals, the incorporation of TEK into

01:03:04.700 Western science is almost always colonial, especially where I hang out. I can't speak

01:03:09.620 to other places. And so, we just say no. Hells no. And part of the reason I put my foot down in

01:03:17.020 such a very concrete way is that when people see, first of all, an indigenous-led lab that says, 0.99

01:03:22.680 no, we don't do that, they have to be like, whoa, what? They have to take a moment compared to say 0.96

01:03:27.300 if it was settler-led or if we were predominantly settler. This doesn't mean that there isn't TEK

01:03:33.140 that flows through the lab because we've got a bunch of Indigenous folks. We've got First Nation

01:03:38.880 and Métis and Inuit folks in the lab because our partners are also Indigenous, because we're often

01:03:44.920 Indigenous land, because we're using the skills we've learned and the things we know at different

01:03:49.300 parts in our life. Of course, there's traditional knowledge flowing through the lab. It's just not

01:03:52.780 for public consumption. It is never recorded. That's one of the rules I have. So sometimes,

01:03:58.520 for instance, we'll sample in places because, you know, elders tell us to. We don't include that.

01:04:05.120 We don't include that in our documentation. We follow it. We live it. We, you know,

01:04:09.480 we're accountable to it, but that doesn't then circulate outside of that relationship.

01:04:14.520 One of the ways that my elder Rick Tavoya talks about this relationship is the reason that you

01:04:19.360 don't film ceremony or things that are sacred or things that are extremely place-based 0.99

01:04:25.040 is because it introduces a foreigner into a relationship that's not supposed to have

01:04:29.620 random foreigners drop in by looking at the pictures later on, right? Not because something

01:04:34.020 captures your soul, et cetera. And so the same thing happens with science is if you start

01:04:38.360 circulating really promiscuously traditional ecological knowledge as data, you've just

01:04:43.640 introduced like everyone in the kitchen sink into a relationship that's not that kind of relationship.

01:04:48.520 So we don't do it. Yeah. Those are the sort of values behind that decision.

01:04:52.860 I 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.

01:05:21.240 And 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.

01:05:30.260 And I'm so just grateful for you.

01:05:33.080 So thanks for being with us today and for your work.

01:05:36.000 And I definitely will follow what you're doing in the world and just know you have a team of supporters at For the Wild rooting you along.

01:05:46.160 Awesome.

01:05:47.440 Well, thanks.

01:05:48.340 That was a very generous thank you.

01:05:50.940 So appreciate that.

01:05:52.020 And thank you back.

01:06:01.040 Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast.

01:06:05.340 I'm audio producer Andrew Storrs.

01:06:08.180 The music you heard today was from Ila Bamba and Ani DeFranco.

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01:06:19.200 Aidan McRae, Francesca Glassbell, Hannah Wilton, Aaron Wise, Erica Ekrem, Carter Lou McIlroy, and Melanie Younger.

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For The Wild - July 06, 2022

Dr. MAX LIBOIRON on Reorienting Within a World of Plastic [ENCORE] ⧸294

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