Plastic is the New Gold (Episode 14)

Conch shells, West Indian emancipation, and the value hidden in what we discard.

Plastic is the New Gold (Episode 14)
Lee Saville-Iksic

TRANSCRIPT

The other day, my family was picking up the house. As I was clearing various items that had accumulated on a bookshelf, I came across a plastic toy - the kind you get in a kid’s meal at a fast food restaurant. I held it up for my wife to see, with a gesture that said, “Do we need to keep this?”. She wondered out loud whether it could be recycled, which I was glad to hear. She knows that I can get frustrated - and even a little self-righteous - about how much plastic our life involves (especially when it comes in the form of little toys like the one I was holding); so, in addition to conceding to its disposal, she also urged me to consider the value of such an item - in other words, the interest it provided either one of our sons, and how that bit of interest allow either of us to focus on our own needs and agendas for as much as ten minutes. “And because of that,” she said, “it’s like a little piece of gold.” I smiled with delight at the coincidence: I had already planned out this episode, including the title, but up to that point, I hadn’t said anything about it to her. 

Earlier this year, I had been noticing several billboards around where we live bearing the phrase, “Plastic recycling is a myth.” The advertisement was for a company that sells home cleaning products, and since the company has made a commitment to go plastic-free by 2025, the ad was insinuating that, if I feel OK about buying home cleaning products in plastic containers based on the premise that they could be recycled, I’m being fooled.

The ad reminded me of something I’ve heard mythologist Michael Meade say about the modern use of the word myth… how today, we think of a myth as a thing that is “patently false,” but the old understanding of the mythic realm is something that expresses “hidden truth, universal truth, and also emergent truth.” It occurs to me, that even the things that today we call myths because they simply aren’t true (the eco-friendly nature of recycling plastic being one of them), if the issue is widespread enough to earn the title of myth, there still might be some truth to be found within the associated narratives.

About two weeks before the incident with my wife and the plastic toy, I had had a conversation with my sister about plastic recycling. My family was fortunate enough to have the chance to stay with her on the US Virgin Island of St. Thomas while she was preparing for work there as a volunteer leader of a summer program that teaches island youth about ocean conservation. The nature of island geography means that certain environmental issues - especially fresh water and waste management - are heightened in comparison to how people like me experience them on the mainland. In our conversation, my sister was explaining that, while the island’s systems for recycling plastic are far behind where they are on the mainland, it actually didn’t concern her too much. 

She explained that, if we are to place environmental problems in a priority order of urgency, the most pressing issue currently is that of climate change. Climate change is tied to fossil fuel usage, and recycling requires the burning of a lot of fossil fuels. So following this train of logic, many environmentalists are opting not to recycle plastic. The thought is, let’s deal with the fossil fuel problem first; then some day down the road, when we have a few more things figured out, it will be cheaper (and presumably more environmentally friendly) to retrieve plastic from landfills than it would be to keep making it new… and we’ll know exactly where it is, because we put it there.

While we were staying on the island, my older son became interested in watching a television program about mining gold; and so hearing all this from my sister, I began to imagine colossal mining operations, similar to those we have for gold, being established to mine plastic out of landfills. And that’s about the time the title for this episode came to me: “Plastic is the New Gold.” As I’m speaking now, I can just imagine how absurd that idea may seem. In all honesty, the notion came into my own imagination as a bit of a farce.

We value gold, at least in part, because of its rarity. There is no straightforward way to synthesize gold and science tells us that all the gold found naturally on Earth was created in a supernova that predates the formation of our solar system. Plastic, of course, is made from oil and other fossil fuels - which are also a limited resource - but plastic is considered easy and cheap to make. Everyday, we throw away things made of plastic. But who knowingly throws away something made of gold?

So let’s be real: taken literally, plastic is NOT the new gold; but while I’ll admit I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with today’s title, there also seems to be a metaphor there that still may be of interest. So what if we read it differently? Like: is plastic becoming the new thing occupying our attention, instead of gold? In other words: has the abundance of cheap and disposable things in our lives simply crowded out our pursuit for true value? OR: Might plastic be an indicator for where we look to find gold that would be “new” to us? In other words: could it be that we are meant to discover great value in the things we discard? Through mythic imagination, we might explore all these questions, and it happens to be, that another experience I had on St. Thomas helped me to employ that sense of imagination.

On our last full day on the island, my family went into Charlotte Amalie, the island’s primary center of commerce and history. It was July 3rd, Emancipation Day in the Virgin Islands. This highly revered holiday celebrates the day in 1848 when 9,000 enslaved people gathered on St. Croix to revolt and demand their freedom. The Danish governor was overwhelmed by the crowd and undoubtedly mindful of the revolution in Haiti four decades earlier that resulted in much bloodshed; and so he proclaimed that very day, “All unfree in the Danish West Indies are from today free.”

While walking through town, we came upon a small town square that I would later learn was named Emancipation Garden. There was some sort of festival or ceremony happening there, and always interested in local culture, we decided we would watch. We appeared to be the only White people present, and so as not to be intrusive, we respectfully observed the proceedings from the outskirts of the square. 

A local official was speaking to the small crowd, and I gathered from what he was saying that a bust of King Christian of Denmark had been removed from the center of the square a year earlier in preparation to replace the bust with a sculpture more fitting of the square’s name. King Christian did not assume the Danish throne until 15 years after West Indian Emancipation, but his era of rule was still one of hardship and oppression for those who had only just been granted freedom, and so it seemed inappropriate for him to remain at the center of the garden. The sculpture that was now the centerpiece of the square was of a man of Black African descent. His left arm is held up in a posture of triumph, and in his right hand he holds a conch shell trumpet which he is pressing to his lips; across the pedestal upon which he stands is written the word, “FREEDOM.”

As I thought about the history of slavery - in other words, the residents of the Caribbean islands whose ancestors were taken from their homes in Africa and, by the forces of European colonialism and imperialism, made to serve a slave-dependent economy until that economy was either no longer profitable or no longer legal - seeing how those people were thought of as objects, it occurred to me that the system of slavery treated those people not unlike the way we treat objects that today we make out of plastic: in other words, things that can be utilized very cheaply and then be discarded when they are no longer serving their purpose. 

In looking at all this mythically, I would argue that plastic made its first appearance in the mythic realm of modern society with the release of the 1967 film The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire tells the young Benjamin Braddock that, “There’s a great future in plastics.” And isn’t it, indeed, the longevity of plastic that we are now so troubled by, as plastic waste seems to be showing up everywhere, and in terms of biodegradation, seems to be going nowhere. Similarly, when it comes to systemic racial oppression - just like the average plastic bottle sitting in a landfill - centuries after its initial formation, we are still wondering when systemic racism will finally decompose. 

The official speaking at the ceremony was a tall man in his 50s. He wore a kinte patterned shirt and sunglasses. In his remarks, he referred to how discussions of Black history on the islands often focuses on the legacy of slavery. “But,” he said, “this isn’t who we really are.” Then he went on to list the many cultural advancements credited to the African peoples prior to slavery. In doing so, he was pointing to the cultural ‘gold’ of Black heritage - not only those cultural contributions made hundreds of years ago, but those being made all along and those yet to be made, as well. 

It seems there’s gold behind, beneath, and beyond the plastic; and unlike physical gold of which there is a finite amount, psychological and cultural gold can be synthesized out of the raw materials of our daily lives. Just as that can be true for a culture, so it is also with each of us as individuals. Depth psychology tells us that we all have parts of ourselves that, like plastic, we see as having little or no value - usually because we fear that other people won’t approve of them - and consequently, we throw them away. More often than not, these forsaken parts of the psyche are where we find the true, unique gifts we’ve been given and that we are meant to share with the world. This is the ‘gold’ that’s talked about in psychological alchemy, and it’s a reminder that, sometimes, if we want to find gold, we need to look in the place where we’ve been piling our trash.

At the end of the ceremony, the key officials gathered around the Conch Shell Blower for a picture. Among them was a young man with a broad chest and strong arms wearing a light purple polo shirt. He carried a conch shell like the one in the sculpture, and after the photograph was taken, he raised it to his face, assuming a pose like the one portrayed in the sculpture, and blew several loud blasts on the shell, which were met by cheers and applause from the crowd.

On the islands, the conch shell is symbolic of freedom and the resistance to tyranny. Physically speaking, the structure of the conch is a spiral, and because of the proportions found in this particular type of spiral, mathematicians and aestheticians call it the Golden Spiral… it’s the most common geometric pattern found in nature. Symbolically, the center of the spiral represents the origins of life; on a personal level, the center of the spiral is the indivisible human soul; and on a universal level, it is the unity and oneness of all Creation. 

With his lips pressed to the central point of the shell, it is as if the Conch Blower is speaking into and out of his inherent nature of wholeness as he proclaims freedom through a trumpeting blast on the conch. As the sound of his buzzing lips is amplified through the ever-expanding spiral of the shell, he points to the nature of life, which is always trying to expand outward from its origins. Spirals, however, also move inward; and sometimes in order to expand, we must first retract or be reduced to the very core of who we are, losing the transient attachments of our external lives simply to be reminded of the gold that exists at the core of our soul.

Thinking about the spiral, believe it or not, reminds me again of recycling plastic. Whether moving inwards or outwards, the spiral is iterative, moving through the same radial points over and over as it circles around the center. Just like recycling uses the same base material to make and remake different objects, the spiral tells us that the core lessons we are meant to learn in life, we will actually learn, and relearn, and relearn. And with each iteration, we simultaneously (and paradoxically) expand into a greater fullness of living AND get closer to the center of who we are.

It could be that plastic entered our collective imagination at-large in 1967, but the first synthetic plastic was invented 60 years earlier in 1907 (coincidently just one year before the bust of King Christian of Denmark was erected in Emancipation Garden); and it seems to me that our relationship with plastic has already had multiple iterations since. And that means that we will continue to have new iterations as we keep searching for ways that this wonder material might help us create greater wholeness rather than the disconnected act of discarding the products of our creativity and invention.

Maybe by the time we are mining for plastic, we will have learned another key part of the core lesson regarding our relationship with the Earth and the physical things we create. But in the meantime, our task is to find the gold in ourselves, and it’s likely that we will find at least some of it hidden behind, beneath, or within a part of ourselves that we at some point threw away.



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