What is the role of storytelling in altering the future of plastics? How might storying plastics differently help shift culture? Or invite change? Or directly address plastic pollution, drawing down the volume of short-term use plastics and the host of support chemistries that make them possible?
Join us for an hour of lively conversation with three authors featured in Orion Magazine's recent four-part series on plastic pollution, guest edited by the environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman.
In the series, literature scholar David Farrier explores plastics' false promise to spare us from ourselves. Microplastics scientist Max Liboiron invites us to consider how plastic pollution may be universal, but uneven in their distribution and consequences. Environmental journalist Meera Subramanian investigates the very nature of plastic and blurs any remaining boundary between nature and not. Altman closes the series with an essay about plastics' origins, noting they weren't quite the achievement industry advertised them to be, but rather, the outshoot and byproduct of other ambitions.