by ANJA KRIEGER
In “Thicker Than Water,” journalist Erica Cirino probes the history of plastic pollution, along with possible solutions.
The mahi-mahi the crew hauled in looked spectacular, its bright, shining body of yellow and green, dotted with radiant blue speckles and topped with a long dorsal fin from head to tail. Its fate was the ship’s oven, where the fish — common in Hawaiian waters — would be grilled to feed a hungry team of sailors.
In the mahi-mahi’s stomach, the sailors found a flying fish, which in turn had eaten small spheres that looked like fish eggs. Squeezing them out of its body, the crew discovered this was stuff of a much more synthetic nature: plastic. Not exactly a tasty addition to the menu.
In her first book, “Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis,” environmental journalist Erica Cirino uses this anecdote to reveal just how deeply plastic has worked its way into the food chain. She tracks the story of plastic pollution — from the creation of synthetic polymers in the 19th century and the discovery of their polluting side effects in the 1970s, to today’s plastic crisis, covering the entire life cycle of the material, from extraction and production to use and disposal.
BOOK REVIEW — “Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis,” by Erica Cirino (University of Chicago Press, 264 pages).
It’s still a matter of ongoing research how much plastics end up in our waterways, but estimates show that it’s in the range of millions of tons per year. It’s not only fish that bear the burden of our trash, we now know. More than 900 marine species ingest ocean plastic or get entangled with it, including whales, seals, turtles, and fish. Research shows that even small creatures like corals, plankton, and microbes interact with the remnants of our throwaway society. Some calculate that 90 percent of seabirds swallow plastic at some point during their lifetime. And that’s just the oceans. The ecosystems of rivers, lakes, the air, and the soil are polluted with visible trash as well as microplastics — and possibly even nanoplastics, which are in the same size-range as viruses.
In the course of her investigation, Cirino presents a wealth of facts and figures, knowns and unknowns, and takes a critical, comprehensive look at possible solutions, from clean-up and bioplastics to recycling and politics. She gives a detailed account of how science tries to understand the issue. But she also situates the plastic problem in a larger context, demonstrating the environmental injustices that plastics inflict on communities and countries that are in the vicinity of production plants, or receive the pollution and the cheap trash richer countries want to get rid of — injustices with a long history.
Cirino begins her five-year journey in Los Angeles, boarding a sailboat bound for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the infamous area between Hawaii and California where bits of plastics and other trash accumulate in what some have called a “plastic soup.” As the small crew of sailors and scientists sample the water for plastics, Cirino documents their research. In this nearly windless area, miles away from shore, the sailors encounter daily fleets of trashed plastic products, and when they skim the water with their manta trawl — also used to sample for plankton — they find small pieces of plastic in it.
Undark for more