Dr. MAX LIBOIRON on Reorienting Within a World of Plastic /156
Upclose photo of plastic polymer landscape from Dr. Max Liboiron’s “Plastic is Land”.
Today, over 310 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year, accounting for around 8 percent of the world’s annual oil production. The ubiquity of plastic cannot be ignored as it has become an inextricable part of our living systems, circulating and making home within our bodies, packaged foods, urban environments, marine life, and waterways. We are living in and among “The Plastisphere,” the name given to these industrial-natural ecosystems and materially knotted worlds from the micro to the macro.
Acknowledging our entangled relationship with plastics calls for a more nuanced discussion on waste through the prisms of colonialism, disposability, and knowledge production. What does the history of plastic production and the sanitation movement tell us about the design of modern waste regimes? How can we bring accountability into the scientific study of plastic and honor ecological relationality in the lab? How does the landscape of pollution—and attendant clean-up “solutions”—reproduce colonial dynamics?
“Plastics—whether they are waste or not—are inextricable parts of living systems.”
Dr. Max Liboiron; Photo by David Howells
This week, we dig into these questions with Dr. Max Liboiron, an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where she directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). CLEAR develops feminist and anti-colonial methodologies and instruments in the natural sciences to study marine plastic pollution. Dr. Liboiron has played leading roles in the establishment of the field of Discard Studies (the social study of waste and wasting), the Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement, and is a figure in feminist science studies and justice-oriented citizen science.
In this timely and important conversation, Ayana and Dr. Max Liboiron explore the notion of plastic as kin, oil and petrochemical subsidies, the body burden of plasticizers, the historical construction of disposability, the appropriation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in academia, the feasibility of recycling, and more. Deconstructing the plastic infrastructures around us, this episode will not only shift the way you think about the material worlds of waste, but also bring into vision the possibilities of a feminist, anti-colonial scientific practice.
♫ Music by “Fasting in SF” and “Orca” by Y La Bamba and “Even More” and “Telephathic” by Ani DiFranco.
Episode References
Dr. Max Liboiron’s website
CLEAR website
Discard Studies blog
Articles by Dr. Max Liboiron:
“The what and the why of Discard Studies” (2018)
“Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic” (2019)
“How Plastic Is a Function of Colonialism” (2018)
Recommendations
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser
Recycling Reconsidered by Samantha MacBride
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
"Recycling is Like a Band-Aide on Gangrene "(2019)
“Being a Scientist Means Taking Sides” by Mary H. O’Brien
Research is Ceremony by Shawn Wilson
“Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.