We are not disposable: Sustainable living
The booming and blooming season is upon us again in Monterey Bay. In June, a large school of juvenile ocean sunfish, or Mola mola, corralled into Monterey Harbor, much to the surprise of tourists, locals, Mola enthusiasts, and seemingly even to the surprise of the molas. The same week, a gargantuan smack of sea nettle jellies dispersed by the thousands, congregating near Monterey and Moss Landing beaches and blobbing around wharf pilings.
Two weeks ago I found myself frenetically digging holes in the sand along South County shorelines, observing hundreds of mole crabs scurrying in the shallow water, settling down like peculiar alien hovercraft and squirming their little butts into the substrate. I imagined them dancing to the song “YMCA” while their feathered antennae waved toward the surface, catching the plankton dinner that spread out and rained down around them catered by the ocean’s advancing tide. In some ways I was looking
forward to this time; a sleepier summer incubating a brief respite for our coastline. I shudder when I reminisce about the trash-strewn state of the shores on major holidays in years past, and the damage and danger posed to wildlife and humans. When I organized outreach and beach cleanups, the City of Santa Cruz kindly lent me keys to local dumpsters on busy summer weekends. One time I almost fell into a shipping-sized container while wrangling piles of garbage containing busted barbecues, dirty diapers, foam coolers, and plastic fast-food accouterments that beach visitors had piled on top of its closed lid. These are not fond memories, but at least folks were aiming for the bin?
In spite of wading in literal seas of waste more times than I can count, I vehemently do not believe that humans possess an inherent desire to trash their environment, but rather that we live in a society with a garbage issue that smothers individual action and best-wishes. Waste disposal is a system built to fail, its shortcomings an intentional and crucial component of industrial capitalism. And in response, let’s welcome the eco-campaign, Plastic Free July! Just Bring Your Own bees-wax sandwich wrapper and we’re all good.
I kid. If you’ve read these columns you’ll recognize that I have some secondhand embarrassment for my own sustainability-oriented posse. We sometimes view the world with a naiveté that does not serve us, or the greater population, in an equitable or realistic manner. We can be exclusive. We fantasize that everyone has time, or money, or access. We pretend that environmentalism is easy if you just do it. Why won’t you all just do it? Plastic Free July, a global movement to reduce plastic consumption by going “plasticfree” throughout the month of July and beyond, is becoming decolonized, and I for one could not be more thrilled.
Dr. Max Liboiron, an environmental scientist and
indigenous scholar who directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, a “feminist, anticolonial marine science laboratory that specializes in grassroots environmental monitoring of plastic pollution,” received national attention in 2018 for her research anchoring plastic waste to colonialism. “Disposable plastics are simply not possible without colonizer access to land,” she said. “The end of colonialism will result in the end of plastic disposability.”
Indigenous land stolen for waste disposal sites can be likened to concepts like Cap and Trade, State sanctioned credits for permitted polluting (not in my backyard, please and thank you). The notion of legalizing the pollution of one region while advocating for the protection of another has deep roots in colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and environmental racism. The term “waste colonialism,” coined in the late ’80s, describes how waste and pollution are part of the domination of one group in their homeland by another group.
Van Jones, Obama’s former Advisor for Green Jobs, is famously quoted as saying, “The root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we’re doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we’re doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people.”
Disposable people are pivotal to colonization, and equally integral to our current global waste management stream that places garbage processing in China and toxic landfills in Black neighborhoods. Jones expanded, “If you create a world where you don’t trash people, you can’t trash the planet. We don’t have disposable resources. We don’t have disposable species. And we don’t have disposable people, either.”
I’ve witnessed a rawer, quieter, and more humbled side of environmental educators in the present moment. Campaigns that once shamed individuals for plastic coffee lids now spout “Plastic Free July for Climate Justice” and connect carcinogenic plastic production facilities to
the BIPOC communities where they are disproportionately and unjustly situated. BIPOC experts who have performed the heavy lifting while shouldering direct impacts of environmental racism, finally hearing their voices amplified rather than silenced in the sustainability narrative, will hopefully become the dominant perspective.
Monterey Bay-based educator Claudia Pineda Tibbs, who is sharing her Plastic Free July journey on social media, recently described her childhood relationship with luffa sponges in an entry entitled “Decolonize Your Shower.” “These sustainable sponges are grown by people of color yet we see them being sold in whiteowned zero waste shops across the United States,” she writes, and in an act of reclamation then details her effort to grow her own sponge as an alternative to the plastic mesh loofah. I encourage you to follow her work, as well as activist Jackie Nuñez, founder of the Last Plastic Straw, and race-equity sustainability blogger @jhanneu on Instagram.
As I glided over that swarm of sea nettles on my board, my paddle scrambling the giant ocean omelet of life, I observed multiple jellies with plastic bits entangled in their tentacles and oral arms. In fact, all of the aforementioned organisms in this column contain documented plastic pollution in their beings, including humans. A study published in the 2019 Marine Pollution Bulletin found that debris enters the California coastal food web through those beloved “It’s Raining Men” sand crabs, with microplastic found in approximately 35% of the specimens analyzed.
Like many of you, I feel an indescribable loyalty to these nonhuman sistren. Their unique movements, their multifariousness of color, sex, shape, size, of survival strategy, could fill me with a lifetime of euphoria over and over for millennia. I appreciate them as I cherish the diversity of humanity around me, and as they go, so go we. We are not disposable.