In January 1992, twelve containers fell off a cargo ship into the North Pacific, with one container spilling 28,800 rubber ducks and bath toys being shipped for sale in the US. They were made famous by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who repurposed them along with other flotsam (such as a container-full of Nike shoes which were spilled in 1990) into ad hoc Lagrangian drifters for characterizing and monitoring ocean currents:
Many of these plastic animals remain in the Great Pacific garbage patch, which is a gyre in the North Pacific Ocean estimated to contain six pounds of plastic - mostly microplastics - for every pound of plankton. These microscopic particles come from a variety of sources, including industrial production of microplastics and subsequent release into waterways; the breakdown of plastics on land into microplastics which then pass through rivers and lakes before entering the ocean; as well as the breakdown of larger debris which may enter the ocean in a variety of ways, such as litter, flotsam, or through extreme storm and flooding events.
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The IPCC's April 2022 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate includes a chapter on Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts, and Communities, which cites research showing how land use planning for urban adaptation to climate change has exacerbated sociospatial inequalities. The peer-reviewed analysis, published in May 2016 in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, highlighted patterns of unjust outcomes on low-income and minority groups from technocratic (as opposed to justice-focused) land use planning interventions, in post-Katrina New Orleans, Dhaka, Manila, Medellin, Santiago, Jarkata, Boston, and Surat:
Let us not forget the suffering implied by such outcomes. For example, Bong Joon Ho's May 2019 film Parasite features a scene in which the Kim family's semi-basement apartment becomes completely flooded with rain and sewage during a heavy storm which inundates their working-class neighborhood in a low-lying area of Seoul. They only manage to rescue a few items from the rising water as it contaminates all manner of floating objects, making belongings toxic while forcing people out of their homes:
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The exact effects of microplastics on human health are not fully understood, but their pervasiveness and ability to concentrate endocrine-disrupting chemicals are well studied, and there is evidence of ecotoxological effects on marine plankton, invertebrates, and plants, as well as agreement that the risk to human health requires further investigation. Indeed, a March 2022 peer-reviewed article in Environment International reported their detection of microplastics in the human bloodstream; and an April 2022 peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials presented a meta-analysis of published scientific data concluding that thresholds of microplastic-induced toxic effects on human cells are at environmentally-relevant levels.
From another perspective, plastic pollution is the long-lasting material afterlife of those millions of tons of plants and animals - our distant ancestors - which were violently ripped away from eons of underground rest, their bodies transformed into disposable products thrown away as part of capitalism and colonialism (or else into fuels for burning and release as greenhouse gases accelerating global sea-level rise). As a toxic-(o)-logical endpoint of colonial land relations, microplastic pollution circulates throughout our planet, our food, and our bodies; clean-up is impossible for the microplastic particles which have already infiltrated every corner of our world, making it permanently altered. Our only alternative is to dismantle the power relations and infrastructures that naturalize the discarding of certain people, places, and things, to replace them with relations which are more accountable to our human and more-than-human collectives.
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OTDE's July 2019 release "The Junkyard", set to a soundtrack of quiet post-classical piano, features a rider tumbling down a tower of large, futuristic-looking debris. After the descent, this work reveals an icosahedral spaceship, establishing continuity with OTDE's previous work "Dangerous Cargo" - which had used that ship as its setting for an escape soundtracked with excerpts of clipping.'s Splendor & Misery, an Afrofuturist album about the lone human survivor aboard a cargo ship carrying human slaves. "The Junkyard" reminds us of one stage of the afterlife, in a society structured around human and nonhuman disposability, of nonhuman cargo - a literal trash heap in the process of fragmenting into smaller pieces (though it's not clear to me if "The Junkyard" has a clear critical connection to Splendor & Misery's retelling of the Atlantic slave trade or to "Dangerous Cargo"'s representation of a ship carrying human beings as the eponymous cargo-which-became-dangerous):
While "The Junkyard" shows a person tumbling down a wreckage pile, the September 2021 open-world exploration video game Sable includes many environments which encourage the player to climb up ruins and heaps of wreckage by paying close attention to their structures:
The planet of Sable, known to its inhabitants as Midden, has been suggested as an example of salvagepunk: between all the ruins littering this planet carrying the history of a failed attempt at interplanetary colonization by the Atomic Disposal corporation, hope remains in the people and objects who were shipwrecked as flotsam on the desert oceans of Midden, as they breathe new life and meaning into their existence by reusing, reconfiguring, and reassembling each other for communal, post-capitalist pleasures and responsibilities.
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OTDE's March 2022 release "flotsam", set to an ambient/postrock(?) soundtrack with quiet piano, features a rider surfing towards and then tumbling playfully across a garbage patch of abstract boxes floating on the surface of a body of water:
After this traversal, the rider dives into the water, joining the other particles - bubbles, microplastics, and plankton - which fill the water. In this way, OTDE's "flotsam" artistically imagines "staying with the trouble" (to quote Donna Haraway) in our natural/cultural world and diving into our microplastic pollution problem, rather than calling for a simpler "escape" from culture to nature of the sort depicted by OTDE's earlier track "The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape". After all, this situation offers no satisfying escape: the human-and-beyond-human natural world is already pervasively and irreversibly altered in the cases of microplastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, PCBs and PFASes, and other long-lasting consequences of our society's violent transmutation of our ancient plant, animal, and mineral relatives.
Rated risk to human health:
alterlife is the condition of having already been altered, but still being open to alteration...some of those alterations are incredibly injurious...but [the] alteration isn’t only negative - so we live in community, we might persist despite colonialism, we take hormones on purpose in order to alter ourselves. So alteration's both already happened, but it’s ongoing. And sometimes it’s consensual, sometimes it’s non-consensual...So alter life is about thinking about that, but trying to think about that in a way that doesn’t stigmatize for being altered. You know, in Canada, in the conditions we live of capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy, we tend to stigmatize and render disposable or as a site of further injury, any being or land that’s already been harmed. If you’ve been hurt, then we’ll pay you cheaper. If this land has garbage on it, let’s put more, then let’s concentrate the garbage there. We live in a world where certain people are rendered disposable...So alterlife also has an ethical commitment, which is to value altered life, to have a loving relation, to think as sacred [those] wasted lands, injured life, life that has had to come into existence in relationship to colonialism or white supremacy.
(from an interview with Max Liboiron & Michelle Murphy on pollution as colonialism)