My home beach is a skinny sliver of sand inside an underfunded state park. It lies nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the county’s last remaining hardwood hammock, rumored to house a solitary gopher tortoise who I have never seen. Once upon a time, determined clusters of trees populated this entire barrier island, holding it together against the ravages of wind and sea. Now the trees have all fallen, replaced by high-rise condos that cast long shadows on every stretch of beach, save for one.
It is pristine, if you ignore the plastic debris. Some of it seems familiar and local, but much is entirely foreign to me. Oddly shaped containers that once contained products that I don’t recognize, with raised lettering in languages I don’t understand. It has made its way here from far away lands, drifting on ocean currents before landing here to decorate the shore like cursed confetti.
Worst of all are the plastic bags that have obviously been nibbled by sea life that mistook the trash for something edible, like a delicious jellyfish.
After only a century of single use plastics, this carbonic detritus has managed to infiltrate every ecosystem on earth.
Not even places that are so remote that few humans have ever seen them are safe from plastic. Light and flexible, it floats on the sea and in the wind, never biodegrading, just breaking down into smaller, more insidious pieces. Microplastics are now found in the clouds, in the rain, inside every beast of the land and sea, including a disturbing percentage of human placentas.
Before the word plastic became a noun that refers to synthetic polymers, it was an adjective that meant pliable and easily molded. Today, most plastics are made from long chains of carbon atoms sourced from petroleum.
Though all life on earth is carbon based, very few organisms are equipped to process carbon in its concentrated form. To quote my Ayurveda teacher, Dr. Naina Marbali, nature is not meant to be taken out of context. When we are dealing with concentrated extractions, we always run the risk of poisoning the system.
Upon their discovery, plastics must have seemed like a miracle. A material that could be molded to take any shape or any texture, for a fraction of the effort and cost of using natural materials.
But this story quickly devolves into absurdity from there.
How have we become a culture that goes through the trouble of extracting toxic petroleum from the Earth, then extracting carbon atoms to manipulate them into long chain polymers that will be formed into a fork that will be used once before ultimately haunting the Earth for a thousand thousand years…
…all to avoid washing a fork?
The crisis of plastics has fully disproven the myth that anything can ever actually be thrown away. Archaeologists rely heavily on middens, a.k.a. Ancient trash heaps, to study people who lived thousands of years ago. If the trash heaps of the ancients, who didn’t even have single use plastics, still exist, imagine how long our garbage will remain.
On Earth, the only true method of disposal is decomposition, the dissolution of something dead and putrid into its smallest bioavailable parts, to give new life.
But what about that which can not decompose?
The sad song of the single use plastic object rings out,
“Use me, then cast me aside. I will drift on the sea forever.”
It’s the anthem of our age, and the plastic detritus our legacy.
Sarah Penello’s education in plant medicine began at age 4 in her mother’s backyard garden, and it has continued ever since.
She holds a B.S. in Cultural Anthropology and Biology, with a focus on Ethnobotany.
She studied Ayurvedic Herbalism under Leslie Hanks, and became an Ayurvedic Practitioner under Dr. Naina Marballi, at Ayurveda’s World in New York City.
She is fascinated by co-evolution of plants and humans, and all of the lore, connections, symbolism and mythology that has evolved out of our relationship with plants.
