Environment
From the Plague to a Plastic Island: A Tale of Ecopsychology
Pollution before and after COVID: When climate change meets ecopsychology.
Posted December 26, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Climate change and mass pollution is the new pandemic threatening environmental sustainability.
- A plastic island twice the size of Texas is located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- Ecopsychology becomes an important new ethical movement for increasing social self-consciousness.
Human beings don’t live in a vacuum; we live in the world. This may explain, in part, why we have an emotional instinct to connect with nature. Ecopsychology sees the human and natural world as inherently connected, mutually healing, and a deep source of psychological tranquility; hence, our relationship with nature fosters both planetary and personal well-being. We flourish better when our natural environments are healthy and nurtured by our being in the world. This is why we have an ethical responsibility to the planet, as our psychological health depends upon a robust and sustainable planet.
But with the ravages of the pandemic and the anathema of climate change, we may observe an increasing number of people who suffer from fear, anxiety, depression, anger, helplessness, and grieving associated with the deterioration of our natural environments. The global pandemic only intensified our feelings of vulnerability.
Once the four horsemen of the apocalypse—flood, famine, fire, and death—have been replaced by The Event that changed the world. The invisible foe came without warning, striking like a viper. It consumed people by hordes, stacked in body bags in morgues. Thousands died in a matter of days. The whole country of China was soon under quarantine. Iran, South Korea, Italy, and then all of Europe; the Middle East, India, and North America soon followed. It sprawled throughout every inhabitable continent and infiltrated the planet like a tuber. Within one week it enveloped the entire globe.
We have witnessed the largest catastrophe in recent human history—our lifetime, a metaphysical thinning of the herd. We don’t know what the future will bring. When the dust settles, the death toll will be in the millions, with new mutations of pathogens released into the atmosphere as we breathe in this very moment.
The pandemic has transformed our world in every conceivable way, from restrictions in social, workforce, and economic infrastructures crippling our contemporary societies to health-care, political, and governance failure and institutional, child-care, and educational shutdowns. The result was an increase in global poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, social unrest, diasporas, asylum seekers, mental health crises, domestic violence, addictions, and premature death due to COVID-19. From the familiar to the foreign, disruption of everyday routine; familial and cultural displacement of social gatherings, customs, and ritual; widening disparities and forced adjustment to lockdowns, quarantines, isolation, despair, and uncertainty have become the norm. And we are just beginning to see the fallout.
Dominating our existence, the pandemic has remade the world: we have gone remote. How will this change our thinking, attitudes, and action toward the future? Living in a virtual world reminds us of the urgent need to stop abusing the planet and subvert our looming climate disaster by resisting the need to return to business as usual through retrenchment or by restoring the status quo. Living in helplessness and defenselessness drives home the ethic for rethinking the world and society—our security and future safety—in our deteriorating times. And with the suspension of transnational travel, will this be the beginning of the end for carbon? The plague is like the unconscious: it announces its presence and autonomy without notice, whether we like it or not, like dispatches—notes from the uncanny.
We also bear the plague of pollution. One of the disturbing outcomes of the pandemic was the vast-scale increase in mass pollution, particularly in disposable plastics. In the rapid manufacturing of everything from masks, and sanitizing containers, to swabs and COVID-19 testing kits, large accumulations of trash, waste, and plastics ended up on the streets, in landfills, streams, waterways, and eventually making their way into the oceans, hence adding to the gigantic plastic mounds that already float in the seas.
There is a plastic island so large it is twice the size of Texas and three times the size of France. It is appropriately called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Hawaii and California, the largest of five plastic accumulation heaps that exist in the world’s oceans. Rather than a floating landfill, it is more like a swirling typhoon of microplastics submersed in the sea yet too light to sink, whirling around like an enormous slushy within the top few meters of the ocean surface, which is densely dispersed throughout gyres or large systems of circulating ocean currents spurred by wind movements.
In this gigantic cloudy bowl of soup and underwater graveyard, there are estimated to be up to 3.6 trillion pieces of plastic that are drifting in the patch, and weighing about 100,000 tonnes out of the estimated 1.2 to 2.4 million metric tonnes entering the oceans each year from river runoff. Because the microscopic debris is not biodegradable, it floats and, hence is trapped in a vortex yet moves over a highway, converging on other garbage mounds throughout ocean waterways as pieces break up and scatter. This invades ecosystems, destroys habitats, and poisons marine life due to the cumulative effects of mass pollution. Many scientists concur there are more plastic objects in the seas than there are fish.
These widely distributed concentrations of tiny plastics, trash, and marine debris are said to cover 1.6 million square kilometers of ocean surface. As objects degrade by the sun, rotating currents, and abrasion, they break down into minute pieces, thereby releasing toxic chemicals, and accumulate in seaweed, plankton, and other marine life, which eventually enter the food chain. If not entangled or suffocated upon entering the whirlpool, marine animals such as fish, birds, seals, and turtles ingest the microplastics, which can poison organisms or end up on the dinner table. Moreover, sea life transports non-native species from one place to another via algae, barnacles, or crabs, for instance, which are peppered throughout the world’s oceans. Although marine science organizations such as The Ocean Cleanup Foundation continue to refine their cleanup systems, until the human planet curbs its single-use plastics and prevents mass-scale pollution, the world’s ocean garbage patches will remain noxious imprints from the Anthropocene.
The pandemic has forced us to face how truly vulnerable we are as a species. But until we face the reality of climate change and mass pollution, the collapse of our ecosystems and the despoliation of the environment will only intensify eco-pessimism, anxiety, and psychological despair over the future of our world. As we continue to watch our planet burn, sea levels rise, and plastic islands contaminate sea life, we will remain passive global bystanders to ecocide.
This post is adapted from End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate.
References
Lebreton, L., Slat, B., Ferrari, F. et al. (2018). Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Rapidly Accumulating Plastic. Scientific Reports, 8, no. 4666 (March). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22939-w
Lebreton, L., van der Zwet, J., Damsteeg, J. et al. (2017). River Plastic Emissions to the World’s Oceans. Nature Communications, 8, no. 15611 (June). http://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15611