How horrible, we all agree. We look out over the party, pick out our own children and put them back in the womb, tiny again but this time surrounded by strands of floating plastic fibres. It’s a chemical trespass that none of us consented to – a terrible intimacy.
How horrible, we repeat as we sip lemonade out of plastic cups and eat fruit from a plastic tray. The children are swinging a plastic bat at a piñata, hoping to knock plastic-wrapped candy pieces on the ground so they can collect them into plastic party favour bags.
How horrible. But didn’t we know all along? Hadn’t the last century unleashed a galaxy of plastic – tens of quadrillions of plastic molecules each year – a chemical cosmology right here on Earth? How could we collect a universe worth of plastic on a single planet and expect it not to touch us?
When I was first born, my body went straight into a pair of hands wrapped in latex. Another set of plastic-covered hands placed plastic clampson my umbilical cord to slow the bleeding when it was cut. Moments later,a rubber nipple was placed in my mouth since breastfeeding was out of fashion in the 80s. Before I could even open my eyes, the christening was complete.
For my own children, their relationship with plastic is even more intimate. The ovarian follicular fluid that surrounds and protects the developing oocyte has microplastics in it. Testicles and sperm have traces of microplastics in them. The baptism by plastic begins before a placenta forms; in fact, it begins before any genetic material is coded or can divide and replicate. We are so intimate with plastics that our relationship precedes conception. They found their way into our creation stories.
Plastics are a sacrament of convenience, a mythology beget and peddled by big oil. It is the baptism we choose without a choice every day. One day, before my children or I were born, someone ate the sacrament without understanding the transfiguration. And now we recognise ourselves less and less.
When I look around the small group of parents, everyone looks just as afraid as I do, wide-eyed, mouths open, as if we’re all about to ask the same questions. What should we do? What can we do?
But we’re saved by a huge sheet cake covered in chocolate icing. We all form a circle around the birthday girl and sing to her. With plastic forks, we eat the cake off of plastic-coated plates, and the birthday girl makes a wish and blows out the five colourful thermoplastic candles.
IMAGE
Christy Rupp
Whale and Petroplankton
Plastic debris and junk
I have been making numerous planktonic forms based on shrimp. They are magnifications of small organisms that find their way into the stomachs of the largest filter feeders in the sea. Attempting to consume large quantities of krill in a single intake of water, baleen whales may starve to death or be poisoned by the debris they are unable to disgorge.
Christy Rupp is an eco-artist and citizen scientist. She grew up in Buffalo, NY during the ’60s as the city was coping with the crumbling infrastructure of the rust belt, and the declared ‘death’ of Lake Erie. Rupp moved to NYC, one of a generation of artists lucky enough to participate in the Petri dish of history, culture and nature that was the late ’70s burgeoning East Village art scene.
Dark Mountain: Issue 27
Our spring 2025 issue is a hardback collection revolving around bodies, human and creaturely, plant and mineral, in an era of planetary breakdown.
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