Exploring the Limits of Knowledge in Addressing Environmental Toxins

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her new book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the extraordinary Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and expose plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Mark Simpson is a settler scholar and professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he investigates US culture, energy humanities, and mobility studies. He is Principal Investigator for “Transition in Energy, Culture and Society,” a multi-year research project with Future Energy Systems at the U of A. His work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, and English Studies in Canada, among other venues. In this conversation Heather and Mark talk about how we are, in general, “so saturated by” an animated, often willfully hopeful communication style when it comes to environmental threats that it becomes easy to “turn off” and ignore the direness of present and future ecocide. We focus on figuring out what it could mean to adopt different communication strategies that are organized around conveying a sense of “vulnerability,” “embodiedness,” and “kinship.” If plastics are, in Davis’ words, a “much more intimate manifestation of oil,” and represent a major gap between, to quote Simpson, the experience of the “unseen” and the experience of the “invisible,” then it might be necessary to approach the problem using methods that aren’t familiar, but that are actively “defamiliarizing.” Keeping in mind that their focus is on inquiring about what is not known about plastics, Heather points out that the “timeline for plastics is actually incredibly undetermined” and that “we really don’t know what we’re doing,” fundamentally, when it comes to the whole life cycle of plastics, from feedstock extraction to chemical processing to material production and distribution, to dematerialization. The way Heather puts it is that “we’re fumbling around in the dark,” and in “our hubris” think we are in control. Part of Mark’s research focuses on how this hubris cannot be divorced from the unstable sense of mastery bred by petroculture. He’s written on the simulated sense of smoothness that the energy regime of fossil fuels tries to maintain, even as it becomes more and more of a struggle to maintain it, as the obviousness of the truth of climate breakdown becomes apparent. There is a sort of circularity or stuckness that, they say, we’re still, reluctantly, mired in. And plastics are a primary aspect of that: plastic forms a barrier, a “barricade” that lets us preserve a false sense that we are invulnerable, impermeable, protected. What recourse do we have when the thing we use to control contamination is exposed as a major source of contamination? If people now increasingly understand that plastics fail to protect us from infection and contamination, and that they actively endanger our health, it is because a faith in plastics as a way of living in a bubble has been replaced by a sobering ecological knowledge of this petroleum product’s toxic effects. And that knowledge is spread through networked acts of activist organizing, by artists and theorists who “allow us to sit with the world,” to see it in a new way and shift our “patterns of thinking.”