The Coming Extinction: Plastic As Fecal Matter

I’ll be posting a few articles on this subject in the coming days. As with most horrific truths, it’s unpleasant. So if you want to be happy, stop reading.

---

Since mass-production of plastic began in the 1950’s, we have produced 8.3 billion tons. This plastic has contaminated the natural world. That contamination is representative of the nature of capitalism. It’s not products that litter the landscape, but waste. Trash. Garbage. Social metabolism has created shit, and we are drowning in it.

Plastic relies on chemisty, a manipulation of the natural environment. This can be a wonderful thing. But the product, plastic, becomes an act of arrogance. We litter the world with shit that will outlast our own short-lived existence.

Video of fish full of plastic. Content Warning: Blood

Contrast the pollution of plastic with the creation of monuments. Monuments are meant to commemorate a moment in history, a testament to the strength of a ruler or an accomplishment of a civilization. Like plastic, they remain after our life. But consider the fact that plastic, human social waste, will outlast any monument we have of our species.

When we are nothing but dust, our garbage will remain. Our species' eternal monument then, is fecal in nature. We do not flood the world with our greatness, but with undigestable fibers of social metabolism. Our world is drowning in our own shit. We suffocate the planet with disposability. The plastic pollution is incriminating evidence that our species failed to achieve communism. It is a testament to our slavery to capital. This is our testament to the universe: that we shit out plastic until every inch of the planet contained it. Plastic, useless and wasted and broken down to its smallest polymer, is the one great truth of our society.

Cover image, image2

Article #1:Anthropocene
Article #2:Plastic As Fecal Matter
Article #3:Land Submergence
Article #4:Humanity As Devil