For the program’s 14th iteration, UAS’s One Campus, One Book committee selected Max Libioron’s challenging “Pollution is Colonialism.” Starting this fall, students and faculty across campus have been working through this theoretical book, gathering in reading groups, engaging with library exhibits, and attending lectures by experts and scientists.
Targeted at first-year students, our “campus read” program aims to create an intellectual community where students, staff, and faculty can come together to explore interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems. The UAS Sustainability Committee recommended Libioron’s book, as plastic pollution presents one such problem — and it’s an almost impossible one, as Libioron establishes.
I hardly need to rehearse the reach of plastics, but as the book lays out, plastics are everywhere, from human fetal cord blood to the guts of Atlantic cod to remote glacial-fed streams in our backyard. Plastics are so ubiquitous, in fact, that some scientists maintain that they now constitute a geological layer on the Earth. Plastics can’t be thrown away; there is no “away,” as plastics simply break down into ever smaller micro- and nanoparticles. Recycling represents a band-aid fix, but for a number of reasons, it isn’t the solution either. One important reason is that many of the chemicals associated with plastics are endocrine disrupters that enter and alter our bodies. Ultimately, they deny thresholds we have typically used to manage pollution. In most conventional senses, plastics can’t simply be contained.
Libioron is interested in how we got here. The book opens with an anecdote from a 1950s industry conference where leaders were pitching disposability as a business model; as one growth-oriented executive hopefully declared: “the future of plastics is in the trashcan.” Libioron is much more interested in the problem this mindset created, establishing that the current reality is that plastics exist on time and spatial scales that render traditional landfills useless. Libioron’s provocative assessment is that because plastics defy management strategies, how we address this problem demands entirely new ways of existing in the world. To vastly oversimplify a nuanced and complicated argument, they posit relationships as the solution. Libioron’s “anti-colonial” methodologies begin with indigenous protocols and embrace scientific approaches, too, positing that before we can even ask questions or address a problem, we need to get land relations right. Before we get too far into the weeds of this complicated argument, it’s enough to know the plastics are important in the book, but methodologies are also important.
I found this out this fall when I assigned the book in my introduction to environmental studies class. Thinking we’d spend a couple of weeks doing a deep dive on the vexing problem of plastics, we ended up having a much more robust discussion about how to frame and conceptualize problems in our increasingly global and connected planet. That is, we spent the bulk of our time talking about methodologies, and especially ways to read and gather information. Libioron’s text invites these readings, asking us to consider tensions between scientific and Indigenous, as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches. I admit I was surprised this is what my group of mostly first-year environmental studies students wanted to talk about.
This sense of mutual discovery is what I love about seminar-style education — the students lead the way. They helped me see that Libioron makes a compelling argument for creative, relational, and especially local approaches to vexing problems. As I told my students after the last of our thoughtful discussions, this book, like almost all the earlier One Campus, One Book selections over the last decade and a half, knocked me out of my orbit. After the fall term class, I changed writing assignments and rewrote the directions for discussion board posts in my upper division English classes. I think differently about local committees I’m on and even my recreation. I’ve assigned Libioron again, in the hopes that this term’s students will help me think further about creative ways to tackle complex and interconnected environmental issues in our community. I’m sure they will.
The class discussions also reminded me that it’s good to read things by people from outside our comfort zone, and that it’s good to engage these ideas together. As our social and media landscapes fracture to the point that we almost live in different worlds, and our political climate encourages us to find enemies in those who don’t think exactly as we do, we need to find ways to slow down, to listen attentively to others in our community, and, importantly, to solve problems together.
I’ll leave you with two challenges. The first is simple: listen to your neighbor, especially if they are different from you. Second, if you are feeling more ambitious, choose a book or an article that challenges you to see the world differently, find a small group of people to read it with you, and then sit down over coffee or a beer and see what happens. You won’t be disappointed. Now, more than ever, we need a shared story, a shared sense of connection, and those of us in the humanities are standing by with suggestions for ways to facilitate this community forming.
• Kevin Maier is a professor of English and environmental humanities, and a member of the University of Alaska Southeast Sustainability Committee. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Alaska Southeast. “Sustainable Alaska” appears monthly in the Juneau Empire.
