Dr. MAX LIBOIRON on Reorienting Within a World of Plastic /156

January 29, 2020 For The Wild

Upclose photo of plastic polymer landscape from Dr. Max Liboiron’s “Plastic is Land”.

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Dr. Max Liboiron Ayana Young

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?

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.