In fall of 2024, I started work on a research project on the subject of plastics for a writing-intensive course I was taking to fulfill graduation requirements. The course was called Nature, Wealth, and Power, and it ended up being the most challenging and intellectually galvanizing course I would take that year. I fell into this topic of plastics essentially at random but quickly came to realize that the problems that plastics pose throughout their lifecycle – from production to usage, disposal, and breakdown – encompass many of the most pressing social and environmental issues we face on the global scale. Existential threats to life on earth – most saliently, the triple threats of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change that characterize the Triple Planetary Crisis outlined by the United Nations – intersect at plastics due to plastics’ unique properties and their ubiquity in global society. As a result of my two months of research into plastics I have come to see the proliferation of plastics, and particularly of plastic waste, as one of the humanity’s most pressing problems. This project, though, is not strictly about plastics.
As I conducted my research into the rise and proliferation of plastics, marveling at the scale and pervasiveness of the problems they have created, I arrived at a natural question: How did this happen? Moreover, How did this happen for so long and how was the problem allowed to get so bad? What I started to diagnose was a prevailing problem in our system of global development. This system is dominantly capitalistic, meaning that it is dominantly profit-driven, and consequently it is prone to externalizing outcomes that are both deleterious and diffuse, such as loss of habitat and the weakening of the social fabric. The system of global development, due to its origins in colonialism, is also extractive in nature and fundamentally imperialist in its mindset. By extractive I mean that it is based on the physical removal and exportation of natural resources. By imperialist I mean that the system of global development is a process undertaken for the benefit of historically dominant political actors, to the detriment of historically marginalized ones, which directs the global flow of resources from marginalized communities to dominant ones. In the modern epoch, imperialism is carried out predominantly by transnational corporations rather than foreign governments. The problem I started to diagnose in this system was the enrichment of certain communities and the debasement of others.
My research in plastics led me to recognize the existence of a much larger problem – namely, that in our current system of global development, certain people, places, and lives are enriched at the expense of others. I expected that if this truly was a problem on a global scale, then the problem would reproduce itself in other pressing global issues outside of plastics. This is how I came to my topic of research on this particular project, which I think of as case studies in global capitalist development. In this project, I intend to explore potential parallels between the problems of plastics and another hugely salient contemporary issue, which is the problem of computing. The social and environmental burden of computing is invisible to many people, although it has gained some recognition over recent years. In particular, the boom of blockchain technology drew attention to the immense electricity and water requirements of the servers on which technologies are physically located. These servers are housed in enormous data centers, of which there are now over 10,000 across the globe. Plans to expand data centers have grown immensely since the rise of AI technologies. Computing poses other environmental concerns, as well as hugely significant social and ethical concerns. For this project, I plan to discuss case studies that exemplify the problems to society and the planet that our current trajectory is leading us toward.