Everything We Touch, Responds Back:
An Exploratory Intertwining of the Technocene, Plasticene, and Planthrocene, Through the Lens of Ecosystem-Human Interactions
By Ariana Garcia, Felix Ramin, and Silvana Montagu
We draw a constellation between the Technocene, Plasticene, and Planthrocene. The Technocene focuses on human technology as a main driver of ecologic and geologic change, while also raising questions of how the effects of human-caused changes are distributed between different societies, people, and places.
The Plasticene is an epochal definition that centers the accumulation of plastic debris and how it forces new pathways and relationships between the ecosystem and human-produced pollution. The Planthrocene recognizes the profound interimplication that humans have with plants and the overlooked sensitivity of the cohabiters of our planet (Myers 2017, 3). Intertwining these three distinct facets of human influence creates a vivid picture of how everything we touch, responds back.
In past and popular narratives about human-ecosystemic relations, humans have been portrayed as the main antagonist of the story, who violently destroy the fragile ecosystem. However, this is a reductive perspective because it assigns no agency to the ecosystem. Working through the theoretical framework of the Planthrocene, it becomes apparent that plants are also actors themselves, acting not only in response to human activity, but also to shield, nurture, and communicate with the complex ecosystems they exist within. Granted, the impossible drive of human development and greed is primarily responsible for the degradation of natural habitats, we hesitate to necessitate that humans are the sole antagonist / protagonist / agent of change in our constellation. The Planthrocene draws on gardens as sites for inquiry into how people stage relations with plants, seeking to more broadly question human motives; some extractive and violent, and cultivate future relationships that do not view the needs of plants as external or treat them purely as commodities.
To put a date on it, let’s say 1907. The year plastic was invented could mark the beginning of the Plasticene epoch. However, geologists might begin to date it to the moment that plastics begin to enter the fossil record. Materials like plastiglomerates, which are rocks that have fused with plastic debris (often created through beach bonfires) and have a “great potential to form a marker horizon of human pollution, signaling the occurrence of the informal Anthropocene epoch” (Corcoran 2014). Moments of fusion (of human products and natural products) are becoming spaces of reciprocity and interaction.
A particularly tense confluence for these ideas are mangrove forests. We have found mangrove forests as a site to be especially fruitful for analysis because of the complex interactions between the physicality of the plastic pollution that is increasingly becoming entangled in the roots of the mangroves, the flows and ebbs of the rivers, and the rich indigenous tradition that is being encroached on by city growth. For example, this art piece by Parag Kamal Kashinath Tandel for the Ministry of Mumbai’s Magic campaign, “Make Art for Mumbai’s Mangroves”, engages with the historical and cultural context of the mangroves: “Since thousands of years Kolis [indigenous fisherfolk tribes of Mumbai] have fished, rowed, and inhabited in these estuarial lands, as the realm around them has altered. They are edged by unsustainable infrastructure, these indigenous tribes of seven islands are struggling like the ocean around them because of the ever-encroaching megalopolis in their fishing grounds and villages, their rich estuaries are choking with metropolitan pollutants” (Tandel).
This depiction closely mirrors the point that Kian Goh makes that “Questions of urban impacts and just responses are not limited to the territorial boundary or administrative unit of the city. They extend in different ways within the city — the variable outcomes among different groups and sites in cities — and beyond the city — the ways in which cities and climate change are entangled in broader networks of geopolitics, economics and governance” (Goh 2020, 562). Appropriation of these mangroves is multifold; it encompasses the exploitation of the fishing grounds, the dumping of pollutants, and the displacement of indigenous people all in the name of capital.
At the site of mangroves we can also explore the expression of the Technocene. Thinking about the framework of the Technocene, we can consider how every physical output and change of the environment at the hands of humans has driven large-scale ecological changes. While the reach of the physical Technocene now extends deep into the earth and far into space, perhaps it began with the very first buildings and agricultural systems. Now, it includes deep sea trawlers, microplastics moving through the oceans, satellites circling the earth, and the buildup of methane in the atmosphere among other human residues. The difficulty in defining the limits of the Technocene stems from the unmeasurability of human influence. While certain physical components of human activity such as garbage patches or a railroad are easy to mark as human technology, can we also identify replanted forests or misplaced species as evidence of the Technocene?
In their paper defining and exploring the concept of the Technocene, Zalasiewicz et al. also struggle with the boundaries of the Technocene and ask “how far may one take this unit? Even the thin soils, rough vegetation and sparse sheep populations of upland pasture (once heavily forested) are essentially all continually modified from preexisting patterns to support human populations” (2017). Everywhere we go, everywhere we look, there has been some marker of human intervention left in the earth as technofossils. Conceptual artist Mel Chin attempts to address the sometimes nebulous nature of human effect through the project CLI-mate, a design for an interactive widget that provides feedback on individual actions and their global consequences. Perhaps if everyone tracked their daily activities and choices, we could not only get a better understanding of the Technocene’s extent, but also change behaviors to fix it.
Returning to mangroves as a sight of inquiry, human activity such as aquaculture and pollution are tangible elements of the technocene because of their destructive effects on mangrove systems. The movement of microplastics and larger plastic pollution through rivers and oceans wash into mangrove systems, which sit at the intersection of sea and land. Suffocation of mangroves not only hurts the trees themselves, but also the habitat they form for many aquatic species and the protection they offer to coastal communities.
Media
Systems Diagram
This system diagram is meant to show how the plastic bag moves through different pathways. Through my research on plastic waste, it became clear that the three main initial processes are incineration, landfill, and recycling. However, there are gaps within them, where plastic can escape and enter into natural processes and spaces. Leakages and the release of toxins into the soil and waterways impacts every facet of the ecosystem, but that is difficult to represent in a diagram. Therefore, the main endings (which I hesitate to call them because plastic has a very long degradation tail) are for plastic to clog, enter the food chain, accumulate, break down, and/or drift. All of these processes and interconnections eventually form Plastiglomerate-Ecosystemic Relations.
In the legend, I delineated between different types of relationships, using my own internal vocabulary. Arrows that are single-origin represent a causal or sequential relationship and double-origin ones represent a reciprocal relationship. Through the use of gradients within the arrows, I adopted the shared color language of our project and mimicked the exchange of information between the Technocene (blue), Planthrocene (green), and Plasticine (greyscale and white). Implicit in my visualization is a vertical time scale.
The two images on the bottom are meant to tie-in the Technocene and Planthrocene in distinct scenarios. On the left is a synthetic image that I collaged in Photoshop to represent a mangrove tree’s roots becoming entangled with plastic debris. On the right is an image from “Dispersion, Accumulation, and the Ultimate Fate of Microplastics in Deep-Marine Environments: A Review and Future Directions” by Kane and Clare that depicts microplastic fibers found in the sea: “Residence time within certain deposit types and depositional environments is anticipated to be variable, which has implications for the likelihood of ingestion and incorporation into the food chain, further transport, or deeper burial”. I think by leaving the term “Plastiglomerate-Ecosystemic Relations” very broad, it allows new futures and opportunities to be included in this relatively simplistic diagram.
A driving question of this project, that naturally arises within the interactions between the Technocene, Planthrocene, and Plasticene, is: how does the aggregation of plastic (plastiglomerate, in a physical way that represents the accumulation of waste and the new circumstances of melding and geological change) ultimately change the equilibria of an ecosystem? To this end, many artists have rendered their own imagined realities of how creatures might adapt to these new Plastiglomerate-Ecosystemic Relations and environmental stressors. For example, Pinar Yoldas specifically focuses on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a fruitful birthplace and “as a site of exchange between organic and synthetic matter, of fusion between nature and culture” (Yoldas, Art Agenda). This directly contradicts with the quote “The Anthropocene helpfully poses the question of Nature/Society dualism, but cannot resolve that dualism in favor of a new synthesis”, from Jason Moore’s “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy” because that synthesis is not only possible, but necessary and expected. Speculation about what creatures and new processes might arise in direct response to anthropogenic activity is not fantastical and, in fact, can force us to take a deeper look at how our single-use plastic material can have unintended consequences on complex systems.
Maps
The combined visualization uses Tampa Bay as an area of focus to show the interactions between mangroves, plastic pollution from rivers, and other human impacts on marine ecosystems. Mangrove habitat in the region is visible in green and is part of a wider Mangrove Habitat in Florida dataset last updated in January 2022 from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Riverine macroplastic emissions into the ocean are marked by gray circles, with larger circles denoting higher volumes of macroplastics as calculated from Meijer et al.’s model. To complement this river emissions data, the visualization includes a layer of rivers which are the purple lines extending across the right portion of the image. In addition to these data points, the combined epoch visualization shows dissolved oxygen levels in mangrove swampland, with orange hues showing a year on year decrease and blues showing a year on year increase up to the year 2021. Finally, it includes data on global cumulative human impact on marine ecosystems measured between 2008–2013 of 19 different types of anthropogenic stressors including various forms of pollution, with darker blues and blacks showing more significant impact. Sections of the Tampa landmass that lacked relevant data points were colored with a gray gradient to emulate plastic like that seen in the Plasticene map.
The intention of these maps, particularly the combined visualization, was to spotlight the relationship between human technological activity and plastic emissions on mangrove health, through a lens that urges the viewer to consider the sensitivity of these nonhuman organisms. Plastic waste has been known to become lodged in mangrove forests where it builds up and eventually leads to the “suffocation” and “choking” (Ali 2021) of these mangroves.
Anthropogenic stressors like nutrient pollution can also lead to algal blooms which drive decreases in dissolved oxygen levels and “stress” (Aljahdali 2021, 1) in mangroves. These widely used scientific terminologies ascribes descriptors often used exclusively for humans and animals to plants and in turn frames human actions as not only polluting an inanimate object, but violently hurting another living being. The visualization maps this violence, showing how in these mangrove swamps there has been predominantly a decrease in dissolved oxygen levels and strong negative impacts on the marine ecosystems. Human actions have had violent consequences on plants.
Point of Life Diagram
The Point of Life diagram for our constellation attempts to show elements and phenomena representative of each individual ‘cene spiraling outwards from the case study of a mangrove tree. The outer ring of each ‘cene connects directly to the central shape — the roots of a mangrove. These rings communicate events at specific scale or place, and relate most directly to the life and death of mangrove systems. According to a 2021 report from the Global Mangrove Alliance, “the conversion of mangrove areas for the production of commodities was the number one cause of loss (47%)… strongly driven by fish and shrimp aquaculture expansion” (Global Mangrove Alliance, 2021). To reflect this cause and effect, the outer ring of the technocene loop shows mapping of aquaculture pressure on global rivers, zoomed in to Indonesia where lots of mangrove decline has occurred (Vörösmarty et al., 2010). While the map has been edited to fit the single-color theme of each ‘cene, darker blue pixels show places of high pressure. Moving clockwise, the outer ring of the planthrocene contains an edited map of global mangrove loss in different hotspots. This map zooms into the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, where highlighted areas of the map show loss, and the slightly varying shades of green (edited to fit color scheme) differentiate between land cover change to water or wet soil (Goldberg et al. 2020). Finally, since plastic litter is another cause of mangrove decay, the outer ring of the plasticene loop shows the results of a web app from The Ocean Cleanup that lets you see how a discarded piece of plastic might move around the globe over 20 years (The Ocean Cleanup, 2020). I placed the starting point for the app in a mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Together, these outer rings convey how a single element of each ‘cene (one commodity, one hotspot, one piece of plastic) plays into the global decline of mangroves. Moving inwards in each loop, processes become more globalized as we zoom out from the mangroves and into the larger body of each ‘cene.
The Point of Life diagram for our constellation attempts to show elements and phenomena representative of each individual ‘cene spiraling outwards from the case study of a mangrove tree. The outer ring of each ‘cene connects directly to the central shape — the roots of a mangrove. These rings communicate events at specific scale or place, and relate most directly to the life and death of mangrove systems. According to a 2021 report from the Global Mangrove Alliance, “the conversion of mangrove areas for the production of commodities was the number one cause of loss (47%)… strongly driven by fish and shrimp aquaculture expansion” (Global Mangrove Alliance, 2021). To reflect this cause and effect, the outer ring of the technocene loop shows mapping of aquaculture pressure on global rivers, zoomed in to Indonesia where lots of mangrove decline has occurred (Vörösmarty et al., 2010). While the map has been edited to fit the single-color theme of each ‘cene, darker blue pixels show places of high pressure. Moving clockwise, the outer ring of the planthrocene contains an edited map of global mangrove loss in different hotspots. This map zooms into the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, where highlighted areas of the map show loss, and the slightly varying shades of green (edited to fit color scheme) differentiate between land cover change to water or wet soil (Goldberg et al. 2020). Finally, since plastic litter is another cause of mangrove decay, the outer ring of the plasticene loop shows the results of a web app from The Ocean Cleanup that lets you see how a discarded piece of plastic might move around the globe over 20 years (The Ocean Cleanup, 2020). I placed the starting point for the app in a mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Together, these outer rings convey how a single element of each ‘cene (one commodity, one hotspot, one piece of plastic) plays into the global decline of mangroves. Moving inwards in each loop, processes become more globalized as we zoom out from the mangroves and into the larger body of each ‘cene.
Starting with the technocene, the middle ring shows the Cropland Data Layer (USDA NASS 2021), a dataset depicting land use in the US categorized by about 100 different crops and 15 other classes. This ring relates aquaculture to the broader category of agriculture, a key human technology. Next, the central ring of the technocene shows the World Roads dataset from SEDAC as a broader, global representation of the physical impact of humans. Onto the planthrocene, the middle layer is a map of forest extent with color coding to show loss and gain from 2000–2021 (Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA 2021). The central ring uses SEDAC’s Last of the Wild Dataset. I chose to use the Last of the Wild as the central texture for the planthrocene loop to represent a world where humans are not the central character. Even though this dataset is based on areas that have experienced human pressures, it shows areas that are free from human impact and where nature in a human-free state still exists. That was the concept that I felt captured a large scale depiction of the planthrocene. Finally, for the plasticene, the middle ring shows a shot from WWF’s Global Plastic Navigator, an interactive webpage to explore global plastic pollution data. The map I used shows floating plastic concentration in the oceans and mismanaged plastic waste on land. Moving from one piece of plastic, to global mismanagement of plastic, the central ring now focuses on the sources of plastic. This ring shows a map from the Ocean Cleanup marking rivers that are major sources of plastic pollution into the ocean. The larger the ring, the more waste is output through that river.
The separation of the individual ‘cenes into three loops instead of one as in the original Point of Life Diagram is meant to clarify the processes related to each cene as a whole before combining them into our constellation. Together, the overlapping layers between each ‘cene convey that despite their distinct frameworks and focuses, there are links between the processes of all three that tie them together into the same outcome — in this case, the destruction of mangroves around the world.
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