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Ayana Young: Hey, For The Wild community, Ayana here. Before we begin today's interview, I'd like to thank the city of Bend, Oregon for their continued and generous support of our show. I hope you've been finding time for rest and regeneration under the spell of deep winter, and if you're becoming restless and dreaming of adventure, consider planning a visit to Bend. This winter, you can spend the many exhilarating hours skiing down Mount Bachelor, come springtime, kayak down the crystal clear waters of the Deschutes surrounded by stunning canyon walls. Look ahead to autumn where you can experience the beautiful transformation of the landscape. Every season will reveal the beautiful cycles of wild nature. Bend is a member of Pledge For The Wild: a group of mountain towns that are committed to sustainable tourism and care for the land. We are grateful for the individuals who work tirelessly to protect nature. We're reminded to travel humbly and respectfully, and connect with local businesses and organizations. Consider visiting Bend, Oregon for your next adventure, and help keep Bend beautiful by giving back at pledgewildbend.com that's pledgewildbend.com. 

Welcome to For The Wild podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today on the show I'll be speaking with Dr. Max Liboiron, an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where she directs The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research also known as CLEAR. CLEAR develops feminist and anticolonial methodologies and instruments in the Natural Sciences to study marine plastic pollution.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastics? Hell no. So, recycling is good for ethics; you can be a good citizen, it's better than nothing? But it is not the solution, because it actually allows the problem to continue.

Ayana Young: Dr. Liboiron has played a leading role in the establishment of the field of Discard Studies; the social study of waste and wasting, The Global Open Science Hardware Movement, and was a figure in Feminist Science Studies and Justice Oriented Citizen Science. Max, thank you so much for joining us today. Like I was mentioning earlier before we began our official conversation that this topic, I know, it’s really at the forefront of people's minds as we, I think, as a collective, learn more about our waste, and issues that come with that, so thank you so much for being here and for all of the ways that you interweave your work.

Dr. Max Liboiron: My pleasure.

Ayana Young: I want to say that as I was preparing for this interview, I was very much envisioning that our conversation would begin by discussing the pervasiveness of plastic and plastic pollution but, as I read your work, I became really intrigued by your framing of plastic as “kin”, in response to the dominant discourse on plastic. So, to begin our conversation, I'm hoping you can share what the “plastisphere” is, and why plastic can no longer solely be understood as an inanimate object, and how you arrived at the understanding of plastic as kin?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Ah, that’s a lot of questions in one... maybe I’ll start with the plastisphere, ‘cos that's pretty straightforward. Plastics, whether they’re wasteful or not, are inextricable of living systems. Everything from the fillings in your teeth to your contraceptive devices, to parts of your bones, those are medical things that you do, plastic in your body, to make your bodywork. Meaning just plastics, right, so plastics are already part of making our bodies work, they’re part about making our infrastructures work, they’re in highways and airplanes, and they make automobiles safe, right, they’re in pacemakers… So, they’re already inextricable parts of systems. But then a few years ago. scientists found that when plastics enter certain types of ecosystems, mostly marine ones, they grow unique one-of-a-kind little tiny ecosystems on them. So, the bacteria and the sort of organisms that eat the bacterium and go around it don't grow in the same combinations anywhere else, and that they chose to call the plastisphere: right, the unique ecosystems that only exist with plastics. 

This is what makes plastics particularly interesting as a pollutant, though there are other pollutants that do it too, which is that there's not really a simple nature / culture divide, there's not really an “us and them”, or “it and us”, or whatever you want to call it, and I remember this when I was on one of my first research voyages, is we were out in the middle of the open ocean, there is nothing anywhere near us that you could see above the water, and we came across this floating clump of a buoy with some ropes and snails around it, and living around all of this was not only that bacteria and these sorts of things of the plastisphere, but, like, 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, 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'd 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?” I, personally, voted to leave it in, but I was vastly outnumbered, and outvoted, because the other side has understood their primary, and really their only goal -  to get rid of plastics. And so they took it out, and the fish died, and all the things living on it died, and so this idea and annihilation, right, the ban, the getting rid of straws, getting rid of plastics, “boo plastic”, in a very complete sort of way is very, very strong, even with scientists, you know, across different social movements, across different sectors, as a sort of annihilation relationship. But I think if you annihilate plastics, just, you know, you can do a thought experiment, you would end up in a B-Horror movie really fast like our roads would crumble, our airplanes would fall out of the sky, like, just things would immediately cease working. 

And I'm not saying, “Yay plastic, let's plastic it up, every plastic change we plastic get,” but there are certain things that plastic is good at, and that we need it for, and certain things that shouldn't be used for, like packaging. Packaging can get used for a few minutes, and we’ve turned it into one of the most durable—you’ve used one of the most durable materials in the world, to do it. If I run a design class, I would fail the students who turned in, you know, the temporary use with the longest-lived material combination sort of design idea. So when people talk about the ubiquity of plastics, they usually mean disposables, or single-use, within that, I don't think they usually mean medical waste, which is a very important form of single-use, I think they usually mean certain types of consumer waste, and within that, I actually think they mostly mean packaging! 

So, if you want to talk about the annihilation of packaging, that’s very, very, very different than talking about the annihilation of plastics. That’s the plastisphere part.

The kin part—I am usually pretty hesitant to talk about, mostly because there’s a lot of, a lot of, misunderstanding about kinship, particularly in academia, which is where I spend most of my conversations. So, there’s this, like, fetishization of kinship that is rampant and well-fed in academia right now—we're like, “this is kin and that is kin and chemicals are kin and your left shoe is kin.” And it’s, you know, usually very colonial, and even, I would say, an imperial mindset. Where you go out and you stick your flag in some kin and you say, “that's my kin now. I like whales! Whales are my kin! Mine!” Right? The point of kin is that they claim you. You don't claim them, right? My family has a lot of adoption in it, and so it's very clear to us—especially if you're going back to try and find your biological family, if that's what you want to get up to—is that that family isn't yours to claim. That family has to claim you, that identity has to claim you, if you're actually going to become…sort of, expand your family, expand your kinship. Right? You don't get to be like, “You! Family! Here, now!” Also, family and kin isn't inherently good, so the reason I think plastics are useful to think about kin, if people actually get it right, understand kin isn't, like, a possessive term, which is often how it’s used, is that, you know, everyone has that asshole uncle, that abusive whatever. Right? The abuse in your family or something like that. So, plastics challenge the often fetishized concept of kinship as an inherent set of good relationships. Right? They lead you to figure out, okay, how do you do good kinship with bad kin? Which I think is a problem that a lot of us have to deal with our actual, you know, nuclear and extended families, and so what that would look like with plastic I think is really important. And annihilation isn't one of them. Right? Ostracization and, you know, stepping it out until it behaves so it can come back in, might be part of it but the annihilation discourse is not in any way kin. So, kin introduces a whole new set of problematics. Really, really hard ones. When do you ostracize your kin? When do you not? When do you support them in their trauma, and, you know, sort of bad stuff they're doing? When do you not? These are the problems that I think are more interesting with plastics. But I don’t see a lot of people doing that. I see a lot more black and white situations that are not very “kinny.”

Ayana Young: Yeah, I see what you're saying in terms of plastic not being inherently bad, but when we’re using this long-lived material for short disposable subjects, so to speak, it's stupid actually. It's really not an intelligent way to go about it, and yeah and I—I want to say that I was—.

Dr. Max Liboiron: —Well—

Ayana Young: Oh, yeah, please.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Well, I was gonna 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. That’s stupid. That was a stupid design.” But, you could say, though, you know, “Under what conditions does this make sense? Under what conditions does it make sense to make some of your shortest-lived commodity objects, like packaging, out of our longest-lived materials? How does that make sense?” Because when you answer that, then you’ll know where you have to start working to make the change. And, by and large, the answer that question, the reason it makes sense is: it is so damn cheap. Because oil and the petrochemical industry, which are the same industry, same as plastics, are so well subsidized, and they have so much policy capture that, right now, and, actually, for almost all time, virgin plastic, you know, raw oil, sort of feedstock for plastics, are cheaper and more predictable, they’re more dependable, they're easier to make stuff out of, than recycled material and than, alternative materials. So, of course, that's what you make it out of. So, if you want to make change, you can't say, like, “well, that's dumb.” You have to say, “how does that make sense?”

Ayana Young: I love being challenged like this. Thank you for taking that there, and, yeah, I know, I completely see your perspective on that, and, [Sighs] yeah, I was thinking about the subsidies, about subsidies, in general, the other day. I was speaking to a dear friend about reforestation and doing restoration without the use of petrochemical-driven machinery, and my friend was saying, “Well, you know, it’d just be so expensive, and the labor would be so expensive.” I said, “Well, the other way is so expensive too, but it's subsidized, and that’s why we’re able to use bulldozers, and things like that, in our quote-unquote, “restoration methodologies,” because it’s subsidized. It’s not because it's necessarily cheaper than anything else, but it's very interesting to see what gets subsidized and what doesn't, and therefore, how we’re using certain materials, or petrochemicals, or certain ways of doing things. So, thank you for calling that out in this conversation. I think that's a really important angle to see, or else we're really not going to get anywhere with shifting the way we do things so…

I wanted to say that I was really struck by something, I came across an interview you gave with franknews titled, “Anti-Colonial Science and the Ubiquity of Plastic,” where you were quoted as saying, “the number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 1950's—that’s living memory. We can circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than totally packaged in plastic.” Bringing in this living memory as a response to plastic pollution is incredibly simple, yet really profound, and I would love it if you could speak to the history of plastic production in terms of how and why its necessity was manufactured? And, what the initial response was to the creation of disposability. What is our living memory of plastic?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Well, so, first of all, the 'our' in that conversation, in this conversation, in this entire conversation, is actually extremely fragmented. So the history (where it tells the American history, and the predominant consumer society of the U.S., which is largely white and industrially driven, so—and that is the history of plastic,) there are a couple of different histories and there’s a lot of nuance to this history that I’m just going to skate right over, and there are lots of really good sources out there for more nuance. But basically, plastic comes out of a sort of rising industrial science where one of their values is: “Try things out and see what happens! And if it works, awesome! We can put it towards something.” And so there's a lot of—there are different types of plastic, some of them never really get out of the industrial drawing-room, some of them do… Billiard balls were one of the first service consumer-type plastics, sort of a cellulose base, but the problem is that plastic was really unstable, and so, sometimes, if they got hit really hard, they would explode. Super downside. So, they, you know, kept working on it. Then there was like, you know, a couple of generations, in terms of industrial generations later, there was Bakelite, which is a little more stable, but also highly flammable. So, they were being produced, but they weren't really mass-produced until the Second World War. The Second World War helped get some of these kinks out of the system so things stopped exploding and melting in the rain, and like, turning to mud, and stuff like that. And so, you can think of mass production as being quite enabled by military infrastructures. So the First World War, and then the Second World War really helps mature the actual material of plastic, and in between the World Wars, and the 30’s into the 50’s, 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 “make and do” sort of attitude. Right? Like, 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. And the problem from an industry perspective is that if people are doing that, then they're not actually consuming. They don’t need to consume new stuff. And the problem with plastics, because they're durable objects, is that you just need to buy one of that thing, and then it will, quite literally, last forever. And so, Lloyd Stouffer, who is in the packaging industry from Modern Plastics, said, “The future of plastic is in the trash can.” He said this in the 30’s at a huge industry conglomerate sort of conference. And what he meant was, and you can look this up, this is readily available, what he meant was, “We need to find ways to remove plastic through households, not into households and then they stay.” And so he 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 just throw money, right, into this nice conveyor belt. And so, that was a very strategic effort, strategic plan, but the problem was because society was, like, making do, repairing, and not spending, they had to be taught how to waste. And there was a lot of resistance to it. Susan Strasser’s book Waste and Want has this very cool thing about it, sort of even before the plastic conversation. There used to be tin cups at train stations in the United States, and everyone would drink from the same tin cup. And then with the sanitation movement, they're like, “No, no, no, germs! That’s how that happens!” So we’re gonna use paper cups (this wasn’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 are also problems with—a lot of these disposals were sold to housewives. So, you know, make work more efficient for housewives. And part of that packaging, was disposable hygiene products for women's menstrual cycles, and there are a lot of really funny stories in the archive that don't actually circulate very well, about women reusing what were supposed to be disposables, and also trying to deal with an infrastructure, like toilets, and stuff like that, they weren't quite used to disposables yet, so there's a little bit of a lag in some cases. Funny, funny, horrible, horrifying stories about being, at like, your in-law’s for dinner, and you have a tampon, and there's nowhere to put it in the bathroom, and so what do you do with it? Blah, blah yeah, well, these stories… So, one of the truisms around plastics and waste, that is very well developed at this point, but is absolutely not true is that quote-unquote, “humans are inherently wasteful,” or we are just like a trashy species that trashes things. Besides the super problematic universal “we” there, that erases, like, very important cultural and historical and political differences, is the problem that, actually even the “we” you're talking about, like, Americans, like, white middle-class Americans, this doesn’t even apply to them, it turns out. It was a strategy, it was a plan, it was baked in. There was resistance, that resistance was overcome, as a learned behavior. And then the infrastructure that supports it was put in place, so that there weren't actually other infrastructures you could choose from, after a while. So, if you go to the grocery store right now, especially around here, where I live in Newfoundland, I dare you to find any food source that you want that is not packaged. You can't. It's not behavior, it’s infrastructure.

And that is by design, and that is not designed by what most people mean by quote-unquote, “us,” right? People in social movements, people who mean good.

Ayana Young: I'm also thinking about, in this vein, I’d really like to also understand the timescales of plastic. You know, if you could speak to you how they change and act over generations?

Dr. Max Liboiron: So, the problem with answering that is that a lot of it is speculation and models because plastics have been around for a fraction of the time that they're modeled to exist. Right? So, if plastics last even a thousand years, which is conservative, they’ve only been really around since ‘46 right? 1946 in the way that they are now. Right? And then more modern sort of plastics, maybe since the 70’s, really. 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. What we do know is that when they hang out sunlight, or acidic conditions, or abrasive conditions (so, like, going up and down shorelines in the waves) they fragment. So, because plastics are made of really long strong polymer bonds, really super long, carbon-hydrogen chains (they’re really, really strong bonds) so that molecular bond doesn't really break down. That's why plastics last so long. That's why they're so flexible and so strong. Right? All these sorts of things. So, when they're in the sun or acidic or abrasive conditions, they’ll fragment, but those polymer bonds will stay intact. So, basically, it's just fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces while staying completely chemically the same. And those fragments can get so small that they can be the size of nanoparticles, which, if you know anyone who works in the Nano sort of area, they work really hard to make things at that size. And plastic, they’ll just get there by themselves if you leave them, like, you know, on a beach, or something like that. And they have very different effects at these different sizes because they hang out in very different ecosystems. So, I remember, it must have been 15 years ago... maybe 10 years ago, reading a study where they found plastic circulating in the gills of fish, people were like, “WHOA THAT’S CRAZY, THAT’S SO SMALL!” Now we know it circulates in the blood of mussels— “WHOA THAT’S SO SMALL!” So, the different sizes mean that they're interacting in very different relationships in ecosystems and in worlds. So, when they're bigger, like fishing gear that you can see with your eyes from a distance, they tend to do things like entangle whales, and turtles, and that sort of stuff. When they get really, really, small, we’re actually researching that now because it's hard to tell what they get up to. So, there's a lot of different stuff going.

The other thing is, with most of those models, and some of them might have changed by now, but at least a couple of years ago and earlier, when you see an estimate like, “Oh this kind of plastic breaks down in ten thousand years,” the way that scientists figure that out was to blast the plastic with all of the things that make it fragment. 

So bright, light bright UV light, acidic conditions, often using urea, which is the same thing as urine, highly vibrating, sort of, abrasive conditions, and then they would measure how those bonds weakened or flexed, not came apart, because they didn't, but they weakened and flexed, and then mathematically it was extrapolated from that. It turns out, there are very few real-world conditions that are brightly lit, vibrating jars of pee, where you find plastics. Usually, they’re hanging out in very different environments, so a lot of those estimates are very estimate-y to the point where, I basically just say, “Plastics last forever, let’s treat them that way.” Let’s not be like, “Well, if it's only two thousand years…” Because what if it's twenty thousand years, what if it's something else? We don't really know. Not from an empirical sort of, “Oh yes, I have watched that plastic degrade.” 

The other thing we don't know a lot about is once those polymers do break into smaller chains, are those smaller chains toxic? What do they get up to? What are they like? We don’t have a super good grasp on that, and that includes things for like bioplastics and stuff like that, when they turn into smaller chunks. Those smaller chunks are running around now in the blood of mussels and stuff like that, how do they act? We don’t really know.

Ayana Young: Drawing upon plastics and deep time, I'm thinking about how we're only ever moving pollution, not eliminating it, and I'd like to explore the fallacy of many proposed solutions that seek to remove plastics, especially in relation to marine pollution. You openly discuss how the push to quote “remove plastic” from the ocean is fundamentally misguided, and that it ignores how deeply embedded plastics have become the ecosystem, especially microplastics, which I feel like is something that you were just speaking to. So, why is it that nearly all technical solutions have failed to address plastic pollution, and is it even possible to have a solution that addresses plastic pollution within our current economy?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Yes, we're about to make a lot of listeners kind of sad—

Ayana Young: Okay, brace yourselves.

Dr. Max Liboiron:—and I apologize for that, hopefully, we’ll loop around. So, one of the most charismatic examples of this, sort of, “cleanup fallacy” is Boyan Slat’s cleanup array. So, it’s basically a big broom net thing that goes to the water, and, “cleans plastics.” Almost every single scientist, marine biologist, I know, everyone I know who is a scientist who has looked at this project, has criticized it. First of all, because it doesn't actually get to the more problematic sizes, which are the smallest sizes, because its net pulls are kind of big - five millimeters. And the vast majority of plastics in the ocean are less than 5 millimeters—the size of a grain of rice—but also because it's sort of a plankton killing machine. So, it really roughs up plankton, and it disturbs their flagella, and a plankton without flagella, ain't no kind of plankton. It just sort of drifts and dies, well, it was just drifting anyway, but without flagella, it can’t eat, it can’t propel itself. There is a lot of concern about it also killing larger animals, and I have seen photos, you try to clean up the biggest thing in the world that is full of some of the smallest things in the world, you have a scale problem, immediately.

I think on some of the math, it would take up some a gazillion, billion tankers. All the tankers in the world working full-time, just to clean up a small fraction of one ocean, right? These are the scales we’re talking about, people have trouble imagining how big the ocean is. It is too big to clean, my friends. And so, the solution isn't to hang out downstream after the plastics have been created to go upstream to turn off the tap.

So, you can think, you already know, most people already know this, right? If you walk into your bathtub and unbeknownst to you, your bathtub has been running, and you have a flood, do you get the mop, or do you turn off the tap? I would say the vast majority of you will turn off the tap, and then go get the mop. That’s exactly what we have to do. If we're going to sit on the side of the bathtub as it fills with water continuously, and mop, you can sort of see the limited benefits. Are there some benefits? Sure. Absolutely. Right? But that’s not the primary action that's going to address the problem to scale. And so, seizing the production of plastics, particularly packaging which accounts for about 30% of plastics (almost no matter where you are in the world, roughly 30), that's the solution. And most of, or even all, hmm, maybe just most of the people I know who study waste and waste systems always say, “Hey, if you want to deal with waste, you have to go upstream,” Once you got downstream, like, it's just there, and you're right, you're absolutely right you just defer it, you just shuffle it around, you shuffle it into a landfill. Well, that's going to get flooded under climate change, and, even if it's ten thousand years, those plastics are going back in the water. Once Boyan Slat’s cleanup array gets those plastics, where do they go? They go to the landfill. The ocean is downhill from everything, those plastics will end up back in the ocean. So, it's not a coincidence that someone came up with the ocean cleanup array. Because it lets them keep on keeping on with that, you know, faucet, while they're handing out mops.

Ayana Young: No, it’s really important for us to understand this, and I'm thinking about these upstream ways of turning off the tap, so to speak, and we talked a little bit about oil subsidies earlier, 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.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Yep, so I would definitely say that oil subsidies are a core area. Divestment from fossil fuels in general would be a core area, because of the raw feed stock of climate change, in the raw feed stock of plastic. Turns out it's the same feed stock, how weird! So you actually get to do a lot of work with one set of targets. I don't know how to deal with subsidies. I mean there are limits to my areas of expertise, I have many areas of expertise, but they do not go all the way to governance, a state governance. But I do know that it's collective, right? Because that's always true. That action is about reaching across differences, and scaling up, as it were, out of consumerism and into citizenship, into coalitions, into other things like that. And I’m a big believer in going where it’s feasible, so 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. Those are just some of 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. 

Ayana Young: I think back to a mentor of mine, Joanna Macy, who talks about systems theories, and I remember in one of her workshops I took years ago, and she was saying something like, don’t go to the CEO of Exxon Mobil to begin with, start with your community, start with the people who are on the fence. And I think that preaching to the choir, preaching to people that are interested in the choir actually is really powerful, because a choir needs attention and the choir needs organization, and we all can start somewhere, and it doesn't need to be starting with the thing that seems the most difficult, or trying to convince somebody who is so deep in creation. So, I'm with you there. I want to go back to something we were talking about with the polymers and the chemicals that were being leeched, and I understand the plastic isn't necessarily the problem, it is the polymers that decay and that leave the chemicals, and by recognizing this, we can understand that plastic isn't inherently evil, although I know there are times that I have definitely thought that, and probably people listening have also felt that, so I get you. 

But, I'm wondering, how does this thinking inform what you've referenced as a local plastic economy, and what might our consumption look like if we had to be responsible for the byproducts of plastic production? And maybe a third part to that question, and I can re-ask it if it feels like too much at once, but where and how does plastic make sense?

Dr. Max Liboiron: That’s a pretty big question and I certainly can't and shouldn't provide a universal answer to that, I think I'd be very unethical, and also incorrect. It just wouldn't be correct. So, maybe I'll just take an example, a sort of parable, and maybe we can work through that. So if you take seriously this sort of material flows idea, like you're proposing—so the lab that I run, the plastic pollution lab I run, there are a few things that we don't do, because of this material flow problem that you’ve identified. Right? What if you’re responsible for your own waste? So, we've started thinking about, in our anti-colonial science (but this is assumed access to Indigenous land to put your waste in, including scientific waste when you’re doing plastic pollution research) one form of this waste is plastic gloves, which we go through a lot of, latex gloves. Another is KOH potassium hydroxide, which is a chemical used to dissolve tissues and stuff, so that you can get to the plastics, so if you want to dissect mussels or clams, or these bivalves, you can't really dissect the belly of a bivalve, because it doesn't have a belly, so what you do is you take out everything inside of it, and then you dissolve in KOH. KOH is very toxic, and so where does that go? It goes on to Indigenous land to be quote-unquote “neutralized.” So, as a lab, we decided to not do that anymore, not assume access to land outside the lab for our waste, that kind of waste. And the result for that is that we don't use plastic gloves for some really truly disgusting work, because we mostly look in the guts of animals for plastics, with one exception. We put them on when we work with seal because you can get something called seal finger from seal blood which is when you have a cut on your finger and then the blood gets in, and that paralyzes you, so that's not good. So we will use gloves with seal, but not other things. So that means you have to hang out with some super, super gross things like super decayed cod guts that are full of poo because guts end in your poop shoot. Spoiler. So, we work with poo, and partially digested stuff, and so we get in there with our fingernails, and that is gross, but that is also commitment and grossness vs. colonialism, when you weigh it out, we’re gonna stick with grossness. 

For KOH, what that means is: we do not study bivalves. So we don’t use KOH. It means our work takes way longer than our peers, which means it takes way longer to publish, because of not using KOH. You're using your eyeballs, and eyeballs are just much slower when there's a bunch of gunk around. It also means we will never study bivalves. I mean, we can't do it. So when people say, “Hey, why don't you extend this to shellfish, which are also important.” Well, we’re like, “We don't have a process that we think is just to study that, and so we will not study that.” So, there's always this rhetoric of like, “Oh, well, you have to have your cake and eat it too, like if you want to get rid of fossil fuels, how will you have your cell phone?” Well, maybe we won't? Or Maybe there will be one cell phone for fifty people, and you gotta share, or maybe, you know, the cell phones aren’t disposable anymore. 

So we do science just fine without plastic gloves and without KOH, and we’re leading scientists in our field, and our science is better, and which indeed is more ethical because we made those swap outs. But we still have plastics in the lab. Right? Sometimes when we don't have other choices, we're still also working on what to do instead of latex gloves, that’s feasible, so always moving on that. Does that sort of get towards your question?

Ayana Young: Yeah, I feel like that gets to what our consumption would look like if we are responsible for those byproducts and I’m wondering, does that also tie into the local plastic economy? I was interested in that as well and wondering if you could speak to that too.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Ah, well, currently, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a local plastic economy, because the plastic manufacturers are, like, the DuPont and Exxon—like they’re huge, huge, huge conglomerates, so it'd be an exercise in imagining a local plastic economy, and chances are excellent that there wouldn't be much of one, [Chuckles] because the economy that requires plastic right now, which is usually…it starts with extraction—oil and natural gas extraction—goes into fracking towers. Oh, I’m sorry, cracking towers, not fracking towers; fracking is part of the extraction. Cracking towers, these are not local instruments. So, Newfoundland, where I live, Newfoundland, and Labrador, there is offshore oil here. That oil doesn't stay here, it goes far, far away to be processed, and then we get plastic shipped back in. I don't think that could be called the local economy, because you can't even track it. So, the local plastic economy is an exercise in imagination. It is not a thing at the moment.

Ayana Young: And maybe it wouldn't be, at least for disposable plastics. I mean, I can imagine the more local we become, the less we would need disposable plastics. I do think what you were saying about there being certain plastics that are, I don't know, I don't want to use the word, “necessary,” but that is helpful. And so, to not put all plastics in the same category as bad, or we should get rid of them together.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Yeah! So, for instance, I use the example of pacemakers a lot. So, in all my many years of researching marine plastics, I have never found a pacemaker on a shoreline or in a seal. [Chuckles] That tends not to be what I find. Right? There are other… they are not to scale, they don't, quote-unquote “leak” out of infrastructures easily, these pacemakers, you don't like, lose your pacemaker very easily. There are definitely different potentially proper places for plastics, but I definitely think packaging is not generally one of them. And, the reason that packaging is useful is that it extends the shelf-life of food. So, if you don’t have plastic, then you don't have these massive global food economies. Is that a bad thing? [Chuckles] Do we need a global food economy? Hmm? Maybe not, certainly to the extent that we have it now, because we've been just—we have lived, again, in living memory without the kind of global food economy we have now.

Ayana Young: Yes, yes. I'm so happy you spoke to that, because that's, you know what I was trying to get at, with this local plastic economy. Meaning if we are, you know, eating more locally, we would not need to preserve food as long as it takes to ship something all the way from say, Indonesia into our local co-op in California, for instance. So, yeah, I'm totally with you there, and I'd also like to discuss the feasibility of recycling, and where our recyclables are even going at this point. 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 US, approximately half are buried or burned due to contamination and market fluctuations. But I'm not even sure how many of us are actually aware of why recycling? Is it working? Or what's happening to what we are disposing of. So I'm wondering: is it failing because of lack of participation? Or the materiality of our products?

Dr. Max Liboiron: I would say neither of those two things, in the biggest category. So if you're interested in this question, I highly, highly, highly recommend Samantha McBride's book called Recycling Reconsidered. Samantha McBride is brilliant. She was also the research head honcho at the New York City Department of Sanitation, so what she says lands in a very real way into infrastructure.

So first of all, different materials get recycled, or are more or less recyclable. So, aluminum, for example is very recyclable because it's very, very expensive and time-consuming to mine bauxite which is the ore for aluminum, and so that's why you'll see people who…informal waste pickers, professional waste pickers, they’ll often go for metal and aluminum before they’ll go for other stuff, right, that might be where they specialize, and the reason is: there's usually a market for aluminum, right, you can actually make money off it. Paper, not so much. Glass, hells no. Glass is heavy, it's easy to make, and it breaks all the time. So there's almost never a market for glass. Plastics, which is my wheelhouse, is a hot mess, because actually there's no such thing as “plastic” in the singular. There are “plastics”, and there are many, many types, and they have many many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many plasticizers, or monomers, added to them, and then there's different methods for making the plastic. 

So, if you take, like, PET if you extruded it, versus where they blow mold it, actually means it has to get recycled differently. If it has this plasticizer versus that plasticizer, it means it has a different melting temperature, which means you have to recycle it differently. And sometimes, you can't tell what that is because those are proprietary blends. So, when you get a whole pile of plastic, it will melt at different temperatures and turn into an amorphous blob that you cannot do a whole lot with. And, because the raw feedstock of plastics—oil, natural gas, are heavily subsidized—it is almost always less expensive to buy raw feedstock than to use recyclables. So, there’s that.

The thing about recycling—my number one problem with recycling is that the way it's been greened—and by the way, it was greened almost entirely by the container industries, so the recycling symbol was commissioned by The Container Corporation of America which is a paperboard company in 1970. And you'll see things like, when municipal—especially large, urban municipalities like New York City or something—but when their recycling programs are imperiled the people who buy them out are usually the container, plastics, and cardboard Industries…The thing about recycling and the ways it's been greened is that there's a way out of the problem of disposability that is green that is called recycling. So before… the reason that recycling became so popular in the 70’s way was promoted to keep America beautiful, etc, is because of these disposables, largely beverage containers, started showing up places they weren't supposed to, like in ditches, and in farmer's fields, and in cows’ stomachs, which were harming the cows, and there was a lot of outrage around this, especially in the American, sort of prairie area. And so recycling was one way to deal with this problem, keep America beautiful, and sort of talking about litter, and saying this isn't an industrial problem, this is a human behavior problem, and then also, “Don't worry, we’ve saved you with recycling!” was a, like, two prong fork—what’s a two-prong fork? Guess it’s a meat fork. A meat fork method, to deal with the problem of disposability without endangering disposability. Again, ‘cos it was the way to stop saturating markets by moving things through households instead of into them. So, recycling is a very big part of that master plan.

Do I recycle? Yes. Do I think it is a solution to plastic? Hell no. I know Samantha McBride also recycles and she would say the same thing. So recycling is good for ethics, you can be a good citizen. It's better than nothing, but it is not the solution, because it actually allows the problem to continue—it allows that tap to keep going, that bathtub tap to keep going. It gives ya some mops.

Ayana Young: Right, it's the way that recycling is marketed by industry is a tool that creates this social license to waste more, because we feel like, “Oh, well we can just recycle it!” But, 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 and the sense of, “Well, you know, China isn’t even buying our recycling anymore, like, what's the point of recycling? It… we can’t really recycle, you know, we can't even send it anywhere, so let's just throw everything in the trash, it’s a waste of time…” So I definitely feel this type of defeatism when it comes to recycling, and then scaling that even further, and it also seems important to acknowledge that that waste more broadly, in that our garbage, or municipal solid waste, makes up less than 3% of total waste, with the remaining 97% being made up of industrial solid waste. So, I'm wondering also: how is the waste of today different than in previous generations, and how can we address industrial waste, given the tremendous impact it has? You 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, I mean, maybe we do in some indirect ways?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Ah, yeah, so first of all that 93… or 97.3% stat, I've written on it before. It's a super sketchy stat, because the 97 is a self-reported industry, and a lot of that stuff doesn't move into a place where it can be scrutinized, or tested. So, it’s a super shaky number, also a lot of that is mining waste, like mining tailings, which are super heavy and wet. Agricultural waste, including sometimes, runoff, so it's a sketchy number, but… like what I say, is it’s an imprecise number. However, it's a very telling number, because even if it's—let’s say it’s like 80/20 it’s still got the same—it still has the same flavor, right? 

Yeah, so folks who work on mining are actually working on waste. People who work in the food movement are actually working on waste. People who work on extraction industries and climate change are actually working on waste. People who work on clothing and textile issues, and fast fashion, are actually working on waste. So, the good news is most of us are already working on waste, but targeting these larger, industrial, large-scale systems. One of the cool things that happen is— if you go back to say recycling, and how to do we scale this sort of stuff — there’s a very cool group called GAAIA: Global Alternatives Against Incinerator Alliance, I might have gotten that wrong. But those words are all in there. What they do is called the brand audits, when they deal with waste on their shorelines; plastic waste on their shorelines. 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, this many bead plastics, whatever.” They say, “We found this many Coca-Cola products, this may Unilever products,” and because those are accountability metrics… 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 up, we know there’s this huge infrastructure behind it, and we can try to invoke that by following it back up the pipe the way that these brand audits do. So when GAAIA does these press releases, they don't say, “We have found so many more film plastics than other types of plastics!” They say, “The number one polluter on Philippine coastlines is Coca-Cola, for the third year in a row. Coca-Cola, what are you gonna do about this?” So there are ways to bridge these scales, there are techniques to bridge these scales, even without going and looking in the backyard of Coca-Cola (which doesn’t exist) to see what its waste properties are. And that's all you can do.

One of the things that I talk to a lot of young activists about is not to do violence against yourself about how you can't do things; they’re literally impossible. You should release that. You should release to the universe, and not feel guilty for things that are quite literally impossible. And then, adjacent, systems of power are not very faithful in reproducing themselves, actually. So, capitalism, for instance, to pawn something like that, they’ve invested in their own longevity and maintaining themselves. But in the processes where they do that, it's not, like, every time they do something, it works perfectly, and it's even and smooth, and all you can do is throw your soft little body against the monolith, they actually produce things really unfaithfully. So, some of the most success I've had in activism is when I've talked to former DuPont scientists, who go into science, go into chemistry, because they mean to do good, they want to make the world better, and they end up working for DuPont. They are the “bad guys,” that people think are monolith, but actually they're leaving behind these trails, especially when they retire, and they put things in archives, they’re making these, sort of, chinches in armor, they’re unfaithful reproducers of the system that they're part of, and that leaves spaces. There's an artist that looks at this from military waste, I believe. Or, he’s trying to find military installations—black sites—and he does this by looking for the unfaithful parts, where they try and reproduce secrecy, but they can't, because they have to put their poo somewhere. And so, when they ship out their sewage, he tracks that, and that tells him where the military bases are. So, this is just an example of how the systems are reproducing themselves in really patchy, uneven ways, and you can find those little bits, and work on them there in various ways to sort of help with the despair situation that might be happening at this point in the podcast. 

Ayana Young: Hmm. No, it's good to have these silver linings, these ways that we can be subversive, and… yeah I just find the fissures in the system that we can snake up and find ways of breaking this chain… I do want to ask another question that also may feel a bit heavy, but I think is extremely important to discuss, so to transition the conversation, I want to talk about the amount of plastic in our bodies, and the nuances in defining pollution harm, and how alarmed we should be in terms of plasticizers as endocrine disruptors. 

Now, I think many of us are familiar with the various studies showing that humans, all over the world, regardless of their personal plastic, use contain chemicals that originate from plastic; chemicals which correlate to infertility, miscarriage, reduced brain development, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and neurological disorders. Now these statistics are obviously extremely alarming, but I'm wondering: are we justified in our panic, and if so, is there anything that can be done to remediate plastic from our bodies?

Dr. Max Liboiron: So, first of all I wanna 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 are 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. And so actually it’s a justice issue, because even though it's ubiquitous, fetuses, people of lower class, which also tend to be of color, are much more affected—carry much higher body burdens than others. And so that should help you think, “Oh, you can actually mitigate your body burden [Chuckles] with things like money.” And you can. Through certain forms of consumer choice, you can choose not to ingest certain types of food that are packaged in plastic or canned (because cans have plastic lining) and that can reduce your body burden by between probably toast 40-60%, according to research of BPA, in particular. So there are also other types of things that this hasn't been researched on. The problem is, that you’ve still got that other 40-60%. So, you can mitigate it, but you can't eliminate it. And because of that, that's another sort of—that’s another momentum upstream. And so, it’d be like, you have mopped up your body bathtub overflowy metaphor, which has now raged out of control, as best as you can, time to turn off the tap, and that's upstream. 

Yeah, so individual action works to an extent, and I don't think it's the extent that you would hope for, so you know, you can do some of that, especially if it makes you concerned, and that's what you want to spend your time on, but just know that that's not turning off the tap.

Ayana Young: Speaking of these systemic issues I'd like to also speak about your work on feminist and anti-colonial methodologies in the natural sciences, and 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. And 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 the relations and respect at the corner of your work?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Ah, well there probably are literally like, a hundred of them. So, hmm, maybe I will just pick one. A super easy one that is particularly anti-colonial is that we don't do research on Indigenous land if 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, they will go to places that are not their places, or that are under, you know, Indigenous governance, and they'll do research there without permission. But what that does is it swaps out your goods, right, so you might be doing a type of environmental good, but you're also reproducing colonial entitlement to Indigenous land for settler-colonial goals, so probably not what you meant. So, you're being accidentally colonial while you're being purposely environmental. So, actually not that simple: not to go where you're not invited. Also, again, that means that we take a long time to do certain research because we won't go certain places until we got explicitly invited, so I think it took me four years, maybe three and a half years, to go to the northern part of the province to Labrador, because I had to be invited by an Inuit, before I would go there because it’s an Inuit part of the province, but now that’s where I do most of my work, so that's a very simple protocol.

Did you have a different one in mind? Since you have totally read all of my stuff, and I can tell because of how you’re quoting things…something else you wanted me to talk about in particular?

Ayana Young: No, that—I mean, that one is so important, and especially to a lot of our listeners, I think, because I'm sure people listening to this podcast; they want to do good, and they want to respect Indigenous wishes, and of course those are different everywhere in the world, but how to be allies, how to be supportive is really challenging. I think, for people to know that, especially when they haven't been taught how to actually be in relationship with the Earth, and with the people of the land, and this is another question about CLEAR, and so that will give us a chance to talk a little bit more about it, but I'm wondering if you can share a bit more about the importance of community peer-review, in terms of contextualizing the impact of scientific findings for the local community? And, perhaps give some examples from your work with CLEAR.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Right, okay so community peer-review, I’m just going to tell you 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, this is what we found, what do you think?” And, implicit in that is also, “Can we please publish this?” Which is what academic peer-review is, but we just switch the peers out, to be community members. And there are a lot of different values that underpin this and a lot of different benefits, and we don't do it because of the benefits, we do it because of the values.  The first value is community self-determination to how they want to be represented. So, some of these communities are rural, often very poor communities that depend on fish and the things we research and look in plastics for, for life and livelihood, increasingly these are Indigenous contains mostly Inuit, mostly Natuashish in Northern Labrador, but also Nunatsiavut, and so when we do this with them, what we're saying is like, “we're visitors here, even if we're also Indigenous, and what do you think of this, is it valid, and can we circulate this in the way that we have understood it?” Because maybe we will do harm, and we can't know that kind of harm, right, we can't understand whether it's going to cause harm or not, only they can tell us that, because we don't live there and we're not from that community, and even if we have a single member from that community, they can’t speak for that community. So, we'll go to them and make sure that we're not causing harm, but one of the other benefits is that, often that they will really nuance our thinking, ‘cos again, we’re not from there, and they’ll be like, “oh, by the way, that part is wrong, or have you thought about that, or next time you should do this ‘cos that builds on this, you know.” 

And so, in the course of that, that's how we get our research questions, the species we study are because of what people bring up and what people are worried about, what they eat, what they think are important, how we study, where we study. “Oh, you should go check over there ‘cos that's where the old dump was.” “Oh, we didn’t know that. We’re gonna go check over there.” And then it’s also a form of validation, it means our work is automatically more meaningful, because it touches the ground of where these people live, and, yeah, those are some of the basic values and benefits of community peer-review. It’s also cool, it’s also fun, it’s also challenging in ways that are, I think, really important for scientists to realize that they're not autonomous geniuses, and that everything they know is, like, the entire truth, but in fact there are other truths and other forms of expertise that can actually validly challenge you and your science.

Ayana Young: Ah, Max! So wonderful, I love that you do that. I mean I would feel so much differently about science overall as a way of studying if more people did this. I think that's one of the parts about a scientific study that really frustrates me at times, is just the lack of community engagement, and relationship-building. 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 shifts the area focus—is extremely important. 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 I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I've had to restructure almost everything based on 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!” Or, “I thought what I was doing was really good!” Or whatever I thought about what I was doing, but overall, when I take that information in, the way that I can work in the world is so much more potent, caring, regenerative—like actually being a good ally—I mean, it's like, the list goes on and on. So, I respect you and all of your coworkers so much for having that kind of mindset, 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. I've read how, in practicing this anti-colonial science, that you don't get to be separate from the relation that you're also dissecting, and they're not merely an object, 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?

Dr. Max Liboiron: Okay that's a really good and complex question, and the answer is: there's not a single way. So, something that’s really important about accountability, relationality, respect. Is that it’s not actually the same…it’s not always the same. When people who aren’t Indigenous hear Indigenous people say, “All our relations,” I think sometimes people imagine this, like, forever web that just starts with you and just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes, and goes, and goes through everything, and everything connected, and oh my god. But, it’s not that smooth, it’s not like a universal highway that connects everything, it’s actually very uneven. 

So, one of the things I talk about with crew members as we’re, sort of, figuring out: how do you relate to the fish you’re about to dissect, or this fish part you’re about to look in for plastics, is talking about how people are differently accountable for this. So most people actually know that you are not accountable to all your relations the same. You're not accountable to your grandmother the same way you're accountable to your mail carrier, even though you have relations with both. You’re not accountable to your child the same way or accountable to your spouse, nor do you want to be, right? Respect and relationality look different there, so we talk about that lesson, and then we bring it [Chuckles] to the lab member in front of the fish that they're about to look in for plastics. So Métis Nation, where I’m from, has actually an agreement with certain fish since time immemorial, is that if we respect them, we can get food, and if that doesn't happen, they’ll stop being available for food. And so that’s a very specific relationship compared to, say, our vegan lab members, which we have, settler white vegan feminists, who do not have a food agreement, or any kind of agreement with the fish, and they're thinking mostly about life and death, and one big inherently good, and one being inherently bad. I don't have that relationship.

So, different lab members are going to have different relations, different reciprocities, different ideas of respect, it is very important that I do not make the settler feminist take on Indigenous concepts, that’s super rude, it’s called appropriation, and it’s pretty colonial. So, the trick is: how do you, in a lab with a lot of diversity, bring people into their accountability to their fish when they're going to have different accountabilities and different relationalities? So, because we’re methodologists, we try and figure that out in protocol, which is like, the guidelines for hanging out with the fish. So, one of them that everyone abides by is that you don't wear earbuds, like music headphones, when you are working with the fish. Because, no matter what kind of relationship you're supposed to have with a fish, it's not respectful to tune someone out while you're dissecting their body. It’s not… It's a severing sort of action as opposed to a joining action. Also, before you start dissecting, you're supposed to take a minute and just think of that fish where it's from; its land relations, what it was up to, and then you start the dissection. 

We have one lab member who isn't trained in science, and she'll bring up a picture of the animal on her phone, especially if she doesn’t know a lot about it, so if you have Atlantic cod versus mackerel versus Arctic char, she doesn’t know what those different fish look like, so she'll bring them up on her phone, and keep that picture up while she starts your dissection. We don't say, “You must have this relationship.” We say, “You must attend to your relationality and accountability and you have to work on that.” So that's part of the protocol for those things.

Ayana Young: I love it! I really, really love it. And I, yeah, it's just a whole different way of being and doing and, like I said, in my last response, 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 [Sighs] disconnection is the way we relate to each other, to more-than-human kin, I mean although I'm now thinking of the word kin [Chuckles], because of what you said at the beginning, so I almost wanna, 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 and 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, 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. And it feels so incredibly important to name; admit this rush to incorporate TEK in Academia, so I'd love it if you could share more about this, and how CLEAR is navigating this.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Right, so, first of all, I think there are really good projects that can bring Traditional Ecological Knowledge and traditional knowledge, Inuit knowledge, into various spaces, but I also think that relationality, ethics, accountability, start from the place you are. And where I am is in an academic space that has almost no practice doing a good job of that, and all around me are people with immense appetite to consume Indigenous knowledge, mostly as data, and also is charisma, and also as a chance to get grants, on their terms, which is fundamentally colonial. If you think of this or a super-fast and dirty definition of colonialism as settler and colonial access to Indigenous land, life, lifeworlds for colonial goals, the incorporation of TEK into Western science is almost always colonial, especially where I hang out. I can't speak to other places. And so we just say, “No! Hells no.” So when—and part of the reason I put my foot down in such a very concrete way, is that when people see, first of all, an Indigenous led lab that says, “No, we don't do that.” They have to be like, “Whoa, what, hmm?” They have to take a moment, compared to, say, if I would if it was settler led, or if we were predominantly settler. 

This doesn't mean that there isn't TEK that flows through the lab, because we've got a bunch of Indigenous folks, we've got First Nation Métis and Inuit folks in the lab because our partners are also Indigenous, because we're often on Indigenous land, because we’re using the skills we’ve learned and the things we know at different parts of our life, of course there's traditional knowledge flowing through the lab, it's just not for public consumption. It is never recorded. That is one of the rules I have. So, sometimes, for instance, we’ll sample in places because Inuit Elders tell us to. We don't include that, we don't include that in our documentation, we follow, we live it, we, you know, are accountable to it, but that doesn't then circulate outside of that relationship. One of the ways that my Elder Rick Chavolla talked 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? Not because something captures your soul, etc. And so, the same thing happens with science, if you start circulating really promiscuously, Traditional Ecological Knowledge as data, you’ve just introduced, like everyone, and 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.

Ayana Young: 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 weave these different things into your studies is so beautiful and such an example for us all that are listening, and those even who aren’t listening, I think the way that you're going about this is… shaking shit up in the best way, and I'm so… just grateful for you. So, thanks for being with us today, and for your work, 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, rootin’ you along.

Dr. Max Liboiron: Awesome, that was a very generous thank you, so appreciate that, and thank you back.

Ayana Young: Thanks for listening to another episode of For The Wild podcast, I'm audio producer Andrew Storrs. The music you heard today was from Y La Bamba and Ani DiFranco. I'd like to thank our host and founder Ayana Young, as well as our podcast team I'd like to thank our podcast production team Aiden McRae, Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger. Head over to our website for you'll find full episode descriptions, action points, and resources for this show, as well as our back catalogue of over a hundred and fifty other episodes. Please take a minute to rate us on iTunes, subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter, and join our community on Patreon. Thanks, so much for listening, and we'll see you next week on For The Wild podcast.