by Lynn Keller
“Waking flesh.” The phrase captures something both Gander and Roberson value for living in the self-conscious Anthropocene: a turning toward what our senses can teach us. While calling attention to humankind’s ultimate insignificance, shrinking us in our own eyes (as Gander does too, in “The Carboniferous”), Roberson asks his readers also to see through enlarging lenses—to “widen . . . the tube of that measure // of sight we are given”—so as “to see ourselves / in the brief moment / that we are / of the earth” (TSEB 127, 22). Thus, his title poem, which concerns global warming, challenges us to be fully present to our current crisis, not in an anxious way, but in an attentive one, and to live in that awareness.29
The opening of “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” emphasizes the scalar discrepancies of the Anthropocene: the world is dying piece by piece, and each of those pieces is “longer than we,” not just longer than a human lifetime, but longer than multiple generations or perhaps than the existence of humankind.
People are grabbing at the chance to see
the earth before the end of the world,
the world’s death piece by piece each longer than we.
Some endings of the world overlap our lived
time, skidding for generations
to the crash scene of species extinction
the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall,
the mile ago it takes to stop the train,
the small bay to coast the liner into the ground,
the line of title to a nation until the land dies,
the continent uninhabitable. (TSEB 3)
Because some of those endings of monumental phenomena overlap with our lifetimes or with recent generations, we’re able to witness their final moments—comparable, on another scale, to someone’s witnessing the last five minutes in the flight of a crashing plane or to being present at the small bay where a sinking ocean liner comes to rest. The names of ocean liners like the SS Norway or the Queen Mary invoke the imagined sturdy might of nations, but nations themselves last only as long as the land is habitable. As today’s climate refugees from small island nations are discovering, land itself can die; soon, whole continents could well become uninhabitable. (Indeed, recent studies predict that by this century’s end, many population centers on the Persian Gulf Coast are likely to experience temperatures that humans cannot survive without air conditioning.) In the first half of the poem, Roberson works to give his readers a feeling for the almost unimaginable coming together of discrepant large and small scales, or what he calls “the very subtlety of time between // large and small,” which finds us witnessing, in a revision of that formulation, “a subtle collapse of time between large // and our small human extinction.”
After that important line underscoring human insignificance in the scale of deep time, the poem shifts focus, as the poet meditates first on his individual situation and then on how humankind got to this point. “If I have a table / at this event, mine bears an ice sculpture.” While others are “grabbing” at last chances and “chasing” after glaciers, he imagines himself sitting still before a small segment of one of the pieces “longer than we” that he can contemplate and observe. It is, moreover, a sculpture, a work of art (bringing to mind Gander’s turning to poetry at the close of “The Carboniferous”). “Of whatever loss it is,” Roberson observes, “it lasts as long as ice / does until it disappears.” He expresses no obvious anxiety or mourning; rather than focusing on regret for loss, he focuses on present duration. There’s an attitude of acceptance; the time he has is the time he has, what he has to observe is what he has to observe, and, as ice sculpture, his bit of the earth is not only fascinating in its constant change but also implicitly beautiful.
In saying that the sculpture of glacial ice that adorns the speaker’s table will melt into air, Roberson alludes to Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism, perhaps pointing to capitalism’s responsibility for the climate change described in the poem.30 Yet his closing lines make clear that he regards the disappearance and loss we are witnessing, whether or not their proximate cause is capitalism, as consequences of irreversible choices made much earlier:
All that once chased us and we
chased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear,
knife for claw,
locks us in this grip
we just now see
our own lives taken by
taking them out. Hunting the bear,
we hunt the glacier with the changes come
of that choice.
Again thinking in terms of human continuities across eras, Roberson locates the origin of our climate crisis with the earliest human hunters, who devised spears and knives to gain advantage over other species. In assuming dominion over nature, we humans initiated the process of killing the glacier as well; our own lives are being taken by our “taking out” the lives of other species. This is something “we just now see”—that is, we only now see clearly what we have done, and it’s something we’ll only see for a momentary now, before we, too, situated on a rapidly warming planet, melt into vapor and air. Prospero’s lines from The Tempest, which lie behind the English translation of Marx’s phrase, come to mind. Prospero anticipates that “the great globe itself, / yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,” and perhaps there’s some comfort here; in the Anthropocene as before it, each being on earth still has one life and one death.31 Roberson’s assessment of the power of poetry, like that of Spahr and Gander, is shifting and unstable. In the deterministic vision that closes “To See the Earth Before the End of the World,” Roberson denies that the human ability to flexibly perceive in shifting scales can help in averting or delaying eco-catastrophe, though other poems in the same volume highlight human perceptual abilities more hopefully.
Recognizing the importance of scale-variant perception to environmental problem-solving in the self-conscious Anthropocene, Spahr, Gander, and Roberson resourcefully employ varied formal and linguistic strategies to bring emotional and sensory immediacy to issues of scale. Whether or not they believe that the human mind is capable of bridging the scalar discrepancies and meeting the scalar challenges we face, the claims they make for poetry’s contributions to environmental problem-solving remain modest and heavily qualified. Nonetheless, scientists or politicians proposing to address global environmental problems through lifestyle changes or policies that require them will need to take into account the profound psychological challenges posed by the scalar dissonance Spahr dramatizes. Those who, like Chakrabarty, hope to foster thinking on several scales simultaneously, keeping in view the needs of human individuals and societies alongside the large impact of anthropos as a geological force, might learn from what Roberson and Gander reveal about lending sensory power to multitrack narrative and about metaphor’s access to multiscalar imagination. Appropriately, none of the three poets seems willing to relinquish all hope that imaginative or experimental uses of language—or the unflinching attentiveness that makes such language possible—may contribute to positive ecopolitical change, whether by highlighting particular perceptual abilities with eco-ethical implications, cultivating particular ways of conceptualizing the relations of nature and culture or human interrelations with natural processes, or suggesting small-scale avenues for environmental activism.
CHAPTER 2
Toxicity, Nets, and Polymeric Chains
The Ecopoetics of Plastic
One consequential way in which humans are altering the planetary environment is through the production of synthetic chemicals, many of which imperil human and animal health. This chapter explores examples of what I call the poetics of interconnection that two poets, one Canadian and one American, have experimentally devised in response to one set of such materials, plastics. Adam Dickinson in The Polymers and Evelyn Reilly in Styrofoam approach poetic form and composition in radically different ways, but both have devised formal models that reflect the environmental problems plastics produce and that metaphorically enact the e
nvironmental relations plastics highlight. The chained forms of The Polymers and the collage nets woven in Styrofoam enact the imbrication of nature and culture or the natural and the artificial; the permeability between what has conventionally been considered the bounded inside and outside; and the thorough interrelation of living things with one another and with substances in their environments, including human-devised toxins. These works illustrate Reilly’s proposition that ecopoetics “attempts to trace kinetics of whole systems, and to enact connections rather than to mark distinctions.”1
Two concepts useful for understanding the environmental interconnections plastic reveals, as well as the ecopoetry that responds to plastic and its toxicity, are risk society and trans-corporeality. The former was introduced by sociologist Ulrich Beck in the mid-1980s and has proved influential in multiple disciplines. Following from industrialization, the risk society is “a phase of development of modern society in which the social, political, ecological and individual risks created by the momentum of innovation increasingly elude the control and protective institutions of industrial society.”2 Created through the “logics of unintended and unknown side-effects,” “it arises through the automatic operation of autonomous modernisation processes which are blind and deaf to consequences and dangers.”3 The potential dangers involved, moreover, cannot be delimited in space or time: they cannot be contained by national borders, and they may manifest in subsequent generations rather than present ones. They “not only elude sensory perception and the powers of the imagination, but also scientific determination” and tend to be incalculable. Paradoxically, while science is “involved in the origin and deepening of risk situations,” the threats we face “require the sensory organs of science—theories, experiments, measuring instruments—in order to become visible and interpretable as threats at all.”4 The threats to human and animal health posed by xenobiotic chemicals from plastics fit the unsettling patterns of the risk society: they are unintended side-effects of scientific and industrial innovation; they flow throughout the biosphere over time and space and affect bodies in ways that are consequential, even if invisible or not immediately evident; they pose significant yet incalculable ongoing risks that pervade our lives and those of other animals.
Building partly on Beck’s ideas, Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures develops the concept of trans-corporeality to acknowledge the “interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures”; her notion of the trans-corporeal subject “underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ ” Toxic bodies—bodies that have absorbed industrial pollutants—demonstrate the interconnection Alaimo highlights, with potentially significant ethical consequences: “The traffic in toxins [that is, a toxic chemical’s ability to poison various bodies and places in the course of its production, consumption, and disposal] may render it nearly impossible for humans to imagine that our own well-being is disconnected from that of the rest of the planet or to imagine that it is possible to protect ‘nature’ by merely creating separate, distinct areas in which it is ‘preserved.’ ”5 As I will demonstrate, through the content of their poems as well as their netted and chained forms, both Reilly and Dickinson convey the body’s material interconnection with the wider environment and highlight how, in the polluted industrialized world of the Anthropocene, that entanglement puts both human and nonhuman lives at risk.
Dickinson and Reilly would agree with Alaimo that “an understanding of the material interchanges between bodies (both human and nonhuman) and the wider environment often requires the mediation of scientific information.”6 Their poems engage with the molecular scale of chemistry and more broadly with the language, sign systems, and methods of science. Besides indicating the importance of scientific literacy, this broadens the linguistic and visual resources of their art, and each poet responds with playful exuberance to that expansion of possibilities; the porosity between the playful and the serious becomes yet another form of interconnectedness their poetics explore. The Polymers and Styrofoam bring art and science together, while displaying how art may illuminate science for a broader public, how art may be complicit with science’s failures, and how art may offer valuably different ways of knowing the world that can complement those of science or counter science’s limitations. Neither poet simply idealizes art or simply criticizes science. We’ll see, for instance, that Reilly presents contemporary art as being just as subject to corporate cooptation as science is. She reveals that art can foster or sustain environmentally destructive ideologies, just as science can act in accordance with them. Both poets align the experimentalism of art with the experimental spirit of science. Yet they also enact critiques of science’s pretensions to a more objective knowledge and more reliable truth than those that art proffers. Their distinctive ways of translating the language of science into the language of poetry manifest a shared desire to generate alternative understandings of the world, what Reilly speaks of as a “paradigm shift” sought through the formal strategies of ecopoetics.7
Although scale is no longer my analytic focus as it was in chapter 1, both the material and conceptual challenges of scale remain crucial here, as the opening of Styrofoam’s first poem readily demonstrates. The first line is: “Answer: Styrofoam deathlessness.” What immediately follows, “Question: How long does it take?” seems off the mark as a response, as if the questioner were unable to grasp what has just been asserted.8 The query suggests how incomprehensible people find the timescale of Styrofoam’s nonbiodegradable permanence. In the context of that time-twisting and mind-bending consciousness of anthropogenic transformation of natural materials, Reilly attempts an invocation of the muse who seems also a modern version of one of the Fates: a “little dead Greek lady” accessorized with synthetic polymers and holding as her emblem not a tool for writing nor for spinning, measuring, or cutting the thread of individuals’ lives but a vial of, it seems, liquid thermoplastic polymers. Describing her as “dead” in her “eternity.saddle” perhaps undercuts any immortality sustained solely by the human imagination, in contrast with the actual deathlessness of thermoplastics:
& all the time singing in my throat
little dead Greek lady
in your eternity.saddle
[hat: 59% Acrylic 41% Modacrylic]
[ornamental trim: 24% Polyvinyl 76% Polyamide]
holding a vial
enwrapped
Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl-
7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16-octahydro-cyclopenta-diol
(aka environmental sources of hormonal activity (S 9)
When the poet/speaker tries to engage in the traditional poetic invitation to an immortal power to sing through her, she finds herself possessed by something more likely to induce illness, hormonal disruption, and despair than inspiration. This volume’s muse hails the entrance into the environment of the ever-expanding multitude of plastic polymers and the incredibly enduring threats they pose to environmental health.
Subsequent “answers” in this poem reemphasize the altered sense of time required to grasp the impact of the nonbiodegradable materials we are now producing and discarding in such vast quantities:
Answer: It is a misconception that materials
biodegrade in a meaningful timeframe
Answer: Thought to be composters landfills
are actually vast mummifiers
of waste (S 10)
Many kinds of plastic will decay only in the scale of deep time. The rate of plastic breakdown (not to be confused with biodegradation) varies according to the kind of plastic and the conditions, such as temperature and exposure to sunlight. A plastic grocery bag may degrade in five hundred years if exposed to ultraviolet light but may last indefinitely underground. Some kinds of plastic break down in less than a decade, some in millennia, while some are considered permanently chemically bonded: they will never break down. Even when broken down by photo degradation, plastics retain their polymeric
forms. In a far more material way than our gods and muses, they are immortal.
Plastics are being invented (“Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl-. . .”), produced, and discarded in astonishing quantities and at an accelerating rate. According to Susan Freinkel, “We’ve produced nearly as much plastic in the first decade of this millennium as we did in the entire twentieth century.” Globally, the Worldwatch Institute reports, some 299 million tons of plastic were produced in 2013, an increase of nearly 4 percent over the preceding year. Given its durability, this massive production, which accounts for about 4 percent of petroleum use worldwide in plastic produced and another 4 percent to power its manufacture, generates a huge material problem of waste. (Much plastic is used once and discarded; a small percentage is recycled.) Right now somewhere between 22 and 43 percent of plastics end up in ever-growing landfills, while between 10 and 20 million tons each year go into the ocean, where pieces are consumed by marine animals and sea birds, often with fatal results. National Geographic reports that 269,000 tons of plastic debris float in the oceans, and “some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.” Earth’s oceans are rapidly becoming a plastic soup.9
As garbage, plastic is problematic not only in its volume and persistence but crucially as a source of toxic pollution; plastics leach carcinogenic, mutagenic, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the air, water, and soil and into the tissues of plants and of nonhuman and human animals. (A few words about endocrine disruptors: these substances mimic naturally occurring hormones and thus may activate, deactivate, or modify signals our hormones carry. A large body of research on wildlife and lab animals suggests that endocrine disruptors cause reductions in fertility; abnormalities in reproductive organs; increases in mammalian, ovarian, and prostate cancer; increases in immune and autoimmune disorders and in some neurodegenerative diseases. Some research on humans suggests that these chemicals—including PCBs, phthalates, plasticizers such as BPA and DEHP, the pesticide DDT, BBDEs in fire retardants, and PFCs in nonstick cookware—are reducing human fertility and increasing the incidence of obesity, diabetes, endometriosis, some cancers, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals pose the greatest risk to prenatal and early postnatal beings; their damage may be passed on to future generations.) Ironically, plastic may do more harm when broken down than when intact, since its small pellets, called nurdles or, more poetically, mermaid’s tears, are ingested by aquatic organisms, including zooplankton, and can accumulate through the food chain; those same tiny pellets, while leaching chemicals introduced in their own manufacture, also act as sponges to which other chemical pollutants and toxins, such as DDT and heavy metals, attach, making the plastic in the sea far more deadly than that on land.10