Outta Sight, Outta Mind: The Slow Violence of Microplastics
Microplastics are a looming threat, yet we’re on standby mode. How can the concept of “slow violence” help us catch them before they catch us?
“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space... typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space.
We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive… climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift… and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively.”
(Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor)
As international institutions reconvene for the first time in nearly three years and mask mandates fade beyond a six-foot distance, it’s easy to forget what the COVID-19 pandemic taught us about facing invisible threats. How, even the microscopic is capable of turning whole worlds over.
The pandemic came as a shock, but it shouldn’t have. Disease outbreaks are a constant threat because infectious microbes and their vectors are always emerging in the air. The pandemic forced us to finally recognize this threat as valid because it gave it a size, shape, and timeline. No longer did viruses seem like a mere microscopic inconvenience or abstract idea; instead, they materialized into months of loneliness, shuttered businesses, sardined hospital rooms, and gone faces.
The COVID-19 pandemic had been incubating long before the virus itself was born, in what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” Rising temperatures, denser cities, increasing globalization, and decreasing collectivism have been buttering us up for a global pandemic right under our noses. These problems only became ‘violent’ in the traditional sense – “immediate, explosive, and spectacular” – when public health officials and the media made deaths matter. In truth, slow violences target vulnerable populations every day - racial and ethnic minorities, people who are poor, and people with disabilities.
This is to say: a threat doesn’t need to be macroscopic and bloody in order to be potentially world-turning. In fact, invisible threats are even more difficult to address than visible threats because humans need to feel psychologically close to a danger in order to perceive it as urgent. And it’s hard to feel close to a danger one can’t see.
Microplastics check many of the same boxes as pandemic-inducing viruses: tiny, everywhere, and with the worst yet unknown. It might be time to think about microplastics in terms of slow violence, before a more familiar kind of violence takes us by surprise.
Small Plastic, Big Problem
Microplastics make headlines when they’re found in shocking places: the Antarctic, placentas, the deepest trench on earth, human blood. At this point, they’ve been found everywhere, including in our own bodies. While we haven’t conducted enough human-centered studies yet to know the full potential of danger, robust science is happening in the oceans. Microplastics – especially fibers – have been shown to reduce reproduction in marine plankton. This matters because plankton produce half of the world’s oxygen and made multicellular life possible on Earth. Existing risks will only multiply since plastic waste doesn’t go away and is projected to triple in the next three decades. Yet, we’re slow to spotlight these threats, and even slower to develop policy and technology interventions. Federal microplastic policy starts and ends with the ban of microbeads, which make up less than 1.5% of all marine plastic debris. So, what gives?
Human psychology is part of the problem. We evolved to prioritize risks that feel immediate and experientially-grounded, even if larger threats loom in the distance. Having personal, sensory experiences with a threat magnifies our perception of its risk even if the risk doesn’t fit. For example, terrorism ranks high in the American public consciousness despite the low chance of dying in a terrorist attack because some experienced loss personally during events like 9/11. Even for those not directly involved, widespread media coverage and sensational imagery made others’ loss feel personal. On the other hand, we don’t have as sharp a view of microplastics and climate change… yet. Some plastics are so small that they can enter our cells. It doesn’t get more personal than that.
Representing Slow Violence
“How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? “
Invisible, anonymous threats like microplastic don’t lend themselves to urgent thinking because they sit radioactively in the background of everyday life, contaminating everything around and inside of us. Apprehending invisible threats requires a different system of thinking that is ‘deliberate, analytical, and rational.” It means expanding our definition of ‘violence’ to include the slow and accretive. The question becomes: how do we nudge the public toward perceiving risk through this system? How do we represent invisible threats and slow violence?
Instead of adding blood and sensational visuals to the microplastic landscape, Nixon suggests that we rethink “who counts as a witness.” This means telling stories of a different kind of loss: the gradual decay of rivers and the people who depend on them, the whimper of the oceans’ smallest species, and the wilt of generations not-yet-come. It also means transferring the representational power of artists, activists, and politicians over to those who lie at the center of threat but the outskirts of popular media. The microplastic problem, and invisible threats like it, can be drawn down into fathomable terms through stories that are told locally and slowly. But we’ll only catch these stories if we also listen slowly.
