The Garbage Patch as Pacific Frontier: How Ocean Plastic Pollution Keeps Making Colonial Landforms

Amidst the rising tides of climate crises, global concern for ocean plastic pollution has become enmeshed with the imagery of a floating trash island — an island that no one can find at sea. Inviting you on a scientific research expedition spiraling through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Hawaiian beaches, marine ecology labs and beyond, this talk challenges the conceptual and quite literal “grounds” on which both trash island myth and petrocapitalist expansion persist. As land-privileging boundaries of western scientific ways of knowing are imposed on oceanic spaces, dominant solutions to plastic waste recycle crises into colonial landscapes. De Wolff argues for reclaiming synthetics, not by cleaning up plastic from the sea, but by attending to the specific relations to place that are making oceans plastic but can also make them otherwise.

Kim De Wolff is a feminist science and technology studies scholar and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on the intersections of water and plastic, especially in the form of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She is a co-editor of Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures.