Review of Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste, by Tatiana Konrad

In a sense, plastic is the dreamwork of the oil economy: a petroleum-based commodity that inserts itself into social relations, cultivates dependencies, and is designed to be wasted. Boetzkes and Feldman, From Plasticity to the Aesthesis of Queer ToxicityOn the day I started writing this review of Tatiana Konrad's edited collection, Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste, the headline on the evening news was the results just in from Geneva, where intergovernmental negotiations on a global treaty to end plastic pollution had broken down.The splintering was attributed to the divisive yet critical issue of plastic production.Where proponents for waste reduction argued for cuts and the phasing out of toxic materials, nations with greater economic interests in plastic production favored maintaining those materials in circulation through increased recycling and reuse.While the absence of an agreement represents a setback, it is important to acknowledge that the multinational discourse signals some progress insofar as strategies to address plastic pollution have, for too long, focused on localized efforts and individual consumer behaviors rather than coordinated systemic change.An awareness of the inherently transnational nature of the plastic problem is one of the strengths, too, of Konrad's engaging and insightful collection of essays, which variously map the deep entanglement of plastics with the fossil fuel industries and petrocultures that have come to dominate everyday life under modern capitalism.The book is arranged in a five-part structure, bringing together multidisciplinary contributions from established and emerging scholars, grouped thematically around the topics of plastic lives, plastic proliferation, plastics in art and literature, and their future.Its publication arrives at a moment of heightened attention to plastics, as the impact of microplastics on the human body and our oceans, most notably, is of growing concern to the public, scientists, and scholars.What distinguishes Konrad's Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste is the proposition that culture represents a hitherto neglected lens for analyzing the root causes of plastic waste.In this way, the volume responds to "the crucial necessity of shifting focus away from plastic as the frame of reference and bringing the gaze back to human social relations, which are responsible for transforming and destroying the environment through multiple means, including through plastic" (Konrad 2023, 3).A fast-paced foreword by Cymene Howe sketches the book's terrain with a survey of plastic's many contradictions.Plastic is simultaneously a beautiful thing, a terrifying thing, an impervious thing, a leaky thing, and a regenerative thing.Plastic is plasticity, writes Howe, just as it is multiple, geomorphological, a great pretender, and ultimately: everywhere (Howe 2023).Konrad's introduction, "The Petroproduct: On Plastics, Capitalism, and Oil," clearly locates the ubiquity of plastic as a political-economic and social issue, rather than solely an environmental one.As such, the volume builds on and extends the critical work in the energy humanities more generally and,