It may surprise some to hear, but I’m temperamentally a pretty liberal person. That ought to sound a little surprising in the context of my political and religious conservatism, but perhaps not in view of my fawning over the mystical. Nonetheless, lo and behold, my liberal temperament has reared its head lately with a fixation on plastic.

I’m aware that I’m quite late to this party. My wife has been much more invested in the “crunchy” scene than I have, though I’ve certainly respected its virtues at a distance as long as I’ve been aware of it. My point of entry was the emerging studies on microplastics, showing that they are so ingrained in our culture and consumption that even unborn children have been found to have plastics in their bodies. In fact, I learned recently that much of the plastic in the ocean does not come from the more infamous and spectacular flotillas of garbage forming new land masses across the globe, but rather from the plastics that first pass through the human digestive tract and bloodstream before entering the environment. I’ve been convinced that these plastics could prove to be our generation’s lead, asbestos, or mercury — a widely adopted material that proves incalculably detrimental to human wellbeing.

This anti-plastic kick has found me more thoroughly contemplating environmentalism in general, but especially in light of the political divide in attitudes toward it. As a conservative, I can confess that I’ve paid a lot of lip service to environmentalism while trying to wash the bad taste of progressive climate hogwash out of my mouth. I think that climate alarmism has done more to damage conservative concern for the environment than anything else, but I think a larger spectre haunts both sides of the aisle: consumerism. This sinister geist in the fabric of Americana is toxic not only to the environment, but to the body and soul as well.  

I’ve come to appreciate this avenue as the most potent conservative case for environmentalism because it touches on virtually every area of life in ways especially apparent as modern Americans. Buying local and bespoke goods, promoting domestic manufacturing, shopping at farmers markets for less processed foods, valuing quality of products of quantity, and the like all seem to comprise an environmentally friendly ethos that conservatives can get behind. Returning to a more traditional, frugal, community-centered style of consumption is an inherently conservative direction. So why aren’t more people who call themselves conservatives found promoting it? 

Plastic is a good microcosm of the larger issue. I’ve noticed how our relationship to it even changes the way we see the world. Plastic isn’t just infecting our bloodstreams, it’s in our minds. The proliferation of 3d printing has exacerbated the symptoms. 

Plastic is a magical substance. It is cheap, easily manipulated yet also durable, obscenely versatile, can be any color, any shape, and serve seemingly any purpose. Food containers, car parts, furniture, toys, weapons — if you can name it, someone has made one with at least some plastic. Plastic is everything the postmodern person could dream of. This use has fallen somewhat out of favor, but even the word itself, “plastic,” used to refer commonly to the property of malleability. Its very nature is one of infinite potential for manipulation. It is a version of the material world completely within human control, a reflection of the utopia our culture envisions, the world of Star Trek’s replicators, in which the physical has totally succumbed to the powers of human ingenuity, in which scarcity and limitation are eradicated. It’s a material that submits slavishly to human design, placing few constraints and demanding no concessions.

But the poisoning of our bodies and environment by the ubiquity of this substance prove the old adage: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The utopian promises of plastic are nullified by their incompatibility with reality. The world is not made of plastic, nature is not infinitely malleable. In a sense, the ongoing environmental and health catastrophe of plastic waste is a symbolic rejection of plastic by nature and our bodies. The vision of total plasticity and the facts of humanity and the cosmos are at odds. The promise of total power over the world and our bodies is toxic to both subjects.

Modern culture entices us to examine the world purely as a system, a collection of parts, a network of cogs, a web of molecules, because this view enables us to manipulate that system. Viewing the human body this way has spurred tremendous leaps in medicine, after all — but lately, that spirit has begun to ouroborically consume itself through the regressions of MAID, abortion, and transgenderism. That lens that once made the world clearer has begun to prove ineffective, even undoing itself and distorting the world like a funhouse mirror. The world, like our bodies, is far more than just a set of components and interrelated systems to be manipulated. Our relationship to nature is one of manipulation, but not exclusively. It’s also one of habitation, admiration, interpretation, sustenance and stewardship.

It’s as though a paranoia has afflicted me since I began this fixation. I catch myself frequently slipping into the modern mode of thinking, the mode of the engineer and the scientist, the one that colors the world as a set of problems to be solved, a pile of logical propositions devoid of spirit. It feels quite like missing the forest for the trees, like seeing only parts and no objects, only objects and no patterns, only patterns and no stories. I think that mode is part of what makes our generation feel so “disconnected” from nature. Even the use of that term uncovers the modern ethos. The world is fundamentally a series of nodes and connections, it’s a big network, a big machine, an equation, a long polymer chain. 

An unexpectedly poignant example I found was during Sunday school, as we discussed Jesus’ appearance to his disciples following the resurrection. Something about their quaint little world of wooden boats and charcoal fires, Peter swimming to shore across the tiny Sea of Galilee, somehow seemed strikingly alien as we read and I visualized the narrative. Something in my mind struggled to reconcile the simplicity of the setting with the magnanimity of the scenario, or something like that. I wrestled with what it was Peter most basically did in that story of his seeing the risen Christ, and my gut answer was something vague about hydrodynamics, the relationship of biology to its surrounding physics, the physical reality of swimming. I’d thought if I could explain the scene this way it might make more sense, but in so disenchanting the story I was myself disenchanted. I’d bitten the rotten serpentine fruit that assures us knowledge will make us more like God. This answer was hollow and bitter, a cynical perspective on disparate minutiae squeezed so tightly together that the invisible could be excluded for lack of room.

There was a strange nagging “why” regarding the distant nature of the ancient backdrop of the story, a hunger that the fruit of knowledge couldn’t satiate. Perhaps for people who deal in numbers like billions and billionths, one-hundred and fifty-three fish seems like a strange thing to find significance in. For people who can casually fly across oceans and continents on the products of human ingenuity, sailing a wooden craft across a large lake for anything other than leisure is quaint to the point of absurdity and incoherence. 

For one thing, our lives are comparatively so safe and controlled. Our boats are vast steel leviathans, our homes are warmed by fires kept out of sight or the invisible-yet-explicable non-magic of electricity. We wrap virtually everything we buy and sell in plastic to facilitate an ecosystem of insulated, safe globalism. We are perennially shocked at deaths from anything other than old age, constantly forgetting that nature is not totally content and contained under the sterilized iron fist of the industrial world — though even that iron fist of industrialism could be called now a plastic fist of post-industrialism. We are blinded by a world of yellow and black stripes, high-vis signs and clothing, non-slip this and waterproof that, an ugly world of simulation, a world kept at arm’s length, a world the postmodernists have perhaps accurately called phony, artificial, brimming with simulacra. The world of premodern people is not alien, though. Fundamentally, critically, it’s the same one. We have merely convinced ourselves otherwise. And yet, we also really do forget the world was not always like the one we live in.

But, speaking of fishing, I’ve got two spots to fish that are readily accessible to me. One of them is a man-made pond, stocked with fish by some bureau or department, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a parking lot, RV park, and (plastic, go figure) playground. It’s a plastic pond, basically. The other spot is by the river. It takes some pressing through the brush to get there, and you’re not nearly as likely to catch anything, but it’s real. That real fishing spot is where I can remember, even faintly, what the world is really like. In the spirit of Kierkegaard’s double movement, it is only after you remember that there is just survival that you most deeply know that there must be more. It is only when you remember mortality that immortality can enter the picture. It is only when you remember the animal self that you can recall the mind, when you remember the body that you can rouse the soul. Only by understanding what and where you are can you fully appreciate who God has made you, by feeling your smallness in the cosmos that you can sense the imbued eternity set in your heart. 

Plastic is poison because it’s antithetical to the world and the self. We’ve tried to make the world and humanity plastic, and now we’re up to our ears in it, drowning in the cancerous ocean of trash we’ve filled for ourselves. Postwar America loves plastic because we love the convenience, the availability, the cheapness. We love being able to have more for less, but, increasingly, that experiment appears not to have panned out. We’ve taken the easy road, and now a kind of perdition is burning in our world, in which children are poisoned even before they’re born, in which possessions are disposed of nearly as quickly as they’re bought, yet are bought nonetheless, when perhaps it would have been better to have not owned the thing in the first place. It’s a world bereft of heirlooms, stuffed with transient, toxic belongings that rot away at the earth rather than being returned to it. It’s a perverse pipeline of passing pleasures that come to acidify the sea and gnaw away at our health before vanishing, a backwards cycle of civilization that serves to make trash and dispose of goods rather than make goods and dispose of trash.

Permit me to backpedal some, however, as I don’t wish to be one so liberally inclined as to raise undue alarm. Despite its severity, I don’t think the disease is intractable or all-encompassing, nor do I think, as must be stated, that the prescription is oppressive, top-down government policy. The cure must start in the roots rather than the branches. I think the plastic plague we’ve manufactured should serve as a wake-up call to personally and communally go back to the ways of life that worked before, such as buying things made to last, deferring gratification by making larger investments that will pay dividends in durability, fixing things that break rather than replacing them. It’s obviously impossible in twenty-first century America to completely expunge plastic from one’s life. The problem of plastic waste will take generations to undo, most likely. But the wake-up call should be to a life free from the gluttony of our culture, free from endless, and often literal, consumption of cheap plastic trash. The Christian life is one of fasting and giving, not constant devouring. 

I imagine a small dose of austerity will go a long way. I don’t think it’s at all unfair to characterize our society as the morbidly obese person who is all at once too greedy and uninhibited to live and thrive and yet too content in squalid “comfort” to cease poisoning himself. We must be willing to sacrifice momentary comfort for the true joys of life that come from above and to sacrifice some amount of our material stability for the safety and wellbeing of coming generations. Suffice it to say, our society of disposability is doomed to disposal unless we aim higher. If we love God, we ought to conduct ourselves as living sacrifices to Him, stewarding our respective bodies, communities, environments, and legacies for His glory. And perhaps, if we can remember the language nature speaks, we can hear her praising the Lord more clearly.

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, [and whatsoever] passeth through the paths of the seas. — Psalm 8:4-8 (KJV)

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. — Genesis 1:28-30 (KJV)