Plastic

March 1, 2021
A personal and historical exploration of how plastic blighted the planet. Walking her dog one day, poet and essayist Cobb found a piece of black plastic--the inside of a car's fender--outside her yard, a jarring discovery that inspired this wide-ranging meditation on war, waste, consumerism, racism, love, and grief. Weaving memoir, history, and anecdote, the author considers the political, cultural, and especially ecological implications of plastic, which, since it was patented in 1907, now fills nearly every corner of the planet. "Featureless, flawless, eternal," and made into everything from buttons to atomic bombs, plastic has become Cobb's obsession. "I wanted it to speak to me. I wanted it to tell me something about how to live. How to live now, on this planet, in this real life, as a member of the human species." Working at the Environmental Defense Fund, Cobb spends her days conveying information about "planetary trauma and emergency," a job that she does "to make others feel sorrow and concern, but not despair." She must feed their hope "that money can heal the world. That by giving some of their money away, the privileged can help to stem the tide of damage, waste, and plunder embedded in our global economy." But Cobb is acutely aware that systemic change is the planet's only hope. Tracking her carbon footprint when she flies or drives, the author bears striking witness to destruction: Birds and fish die from plastic detritus; decades after World War II, the stomach of an albatross was perforated by a plastic shard from a bombing raid. Cobb also shows how Black communities are especially vulnerable. In Freeport, Texas, home of Dow Chemical, cancers are on the rise; in Mossville, Louisiana, refineries poison land and water. "Most of the plastic ever made remains with us," writes the author, "circulating through water, living bodies, and the atmosphere--and the waste keeps coming." An ardent message about environmental peril.

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Starred review from March 1, 2021
In this elegiac missive from the frontlines of our plastic-filled world, Cobb uses a variety of narrative forms to convey her deep despair over how plastic has overwhelmed our planet. From fixating on a fruitless search to understand how a plastic chunk from a Honda Odyssey shows up in her yard (an abandoned bumper? Who knows?) to creating a horrifying list of trash found on a Hawaiian beach, she pivots to immersing herself in the history of plastic's development, then sets off on a seemingly discursive look at the logs kept by a WWII pilot who crashed and the reflections of Los Alamos scientists. With each spin and glide, Cobb circles her subject ever more carefully. The nuances of her connections can be elusive--she writes more than once about her struggles to tell this story--but it is profoundly inspiring to witness her persistence, her insistence that readers consider the death of a plastic-poisoned albatross and mourn this lost winged miracle. And her ferocious exposure of the deep insult that is the calculated design of plastic items to be used once, discarded, and replaced with reckless abandon makes for an invigorating reading experience. There is elegance and power in Cobb's truly unique environmental memoir.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.