One of the many presents my beautiful, privileged son received on the occasion of his birth was a rubber ducky. Not content with a simple rubber duck, the person who gave him this opted for a rubber ducky encased in a plastic ball, with a fluid in it, and, swimming in this fluid, tiny straw-like pieces of colored plastic. The giver of this present certainly must have been unaware of the abject joy with which this present would provide me (my child possibly less abject, more joy). Nothing could encapsulate the arguments I wish to make in this contribution more completely: a plastic bird, encased in further plastic, with nurdles in soft ” “baby colors” “decorating” the water. So much swimming plastic.

The doubling of the subtitle to this contribution—“Moving (the) Masses”—picks up the mobility focus of this volume in two specific ways. “Moving Masses” refers to the representations I examine in what follows: the pelagic plastic, specifically, pelagic Pacific plastic, which coalesce around images of birds. “Moving the Masses,” in turn, suggests the ways in which we relate to these representations, or, how discourses (visual and written) operate to elicit responses. The rubber ducky floating on water, accompanied by tiny colorful plastic pieces and encased in a plastic ball, is symbol and symptom: the bird is mobile on the fluid, and yet at the same time trapped by the plastic; the ball itself is mobile, and yet connected to flows of plastic as commodity and waste.

The moniker “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is one of the many phrases used to denote the problems of plastic in the Pacific. Others include the “Gyre,” the “North Pacific Gyre,” or the “Pacific Trash Vortex.” The “Patch” of the most well-established moniker is problematic.Footnote 1 As Andrew Blackwell observes, “it isn’t a visual problem, and this conflict between the reality of the problem and its nonvisual nature is at the root of the plastic island misconception. A metaphor is needed, a compelling image to suggest the scale and the mass of the problem” (2013, 148). Blackwell proposes “ecosystem” (2013, 119) and “galaxy” (148) as more appropriate terms.

A related problem is not explicitly recognized in the text and has to do with the genre of his book: Visiting Sunny Chernobyl: Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places. The book’s genre is travel writing, and as such requires a site that indeed can be visited in order that he might write about his “adventures” there, even if the sites ascribe to a darker, dirtier aesthetics than most travel writing (the “polluted” of the subtitle suggests as much, cf. also Sullivan 2014). Of all the sites Blackwell tours,Footnote 2 the concentration of plastic in the Pacific is the trickiest to actually visit. As Blackwell asserts, the mass of plastic in the Pacific is not an island. He makes this point with some insistence, repeating the negation twice (“Let’s nip this in the bud,” he writes. “It is not an island. / I’d like to say that again. It’s not. An island” [Blackwell 2013, 118]). The emphatic negative relation to islands raises questions with respect to Island Studies and archipelagic thoughtFootnote 3 which, given the specific site of the Pacific, warrant some critical attention. The term island suggests a containable space, a discrete object, a stable entity (at least on human time-scales, and most of the time). This, rather obviously, belies the problem of pelagic plastic in the Pacific. Neither the pieces of plastic, nor the effects of the plastic, including the bio-accumulation by virtue of plastic’s lipophilic capacity to bind fatty substances, are discrete phenomena.

Further, as Susan Freinkel suggests in Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, “[a] floating trash island would be a far easier problem to take care of” (2011, 130). Or, as Stacy Alaimo has argued: “The persistent (and convenient) conception of the ocean as so vast and powerful that anything dumped into it will be dispersed into oblivion makes it particularly difficult to capture, map, and publicize the flow of toxins across terrestrial, oceanic, and human habitats” (2012, 447). The plastic shifts, floats, and sinks. It entangles and mangles. And it degrades, exuding lethal toxins into and through the oceans. It moves through the oceans and through biota, humans, and non-humans alike.

Representation with the “Plastic Pacific” faces a considerable conceptual problem as pertaining to representation: For the “Plastic Pacific” is more a shifting accretion of material than a static (accumulation of) object(s). The calls articulated by Blackwell, Freinkel, and Alaimo suggest the extent to which the issue lacks a cohesive imagery. The production, reproduction, and coalescence of representations—images, icons, metaphors—emerge as crucial for assembling responses. In the following, I show how images of birds have become iconic for this issue, in particular the images of two, quite different, kinds of aquatic birds: albatrosses and ducks. Specifically, the images of the Laysan albatross, lying prostrate with plastic, and the rubber duck (the former made famous, for instance, by Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series and the image from Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume;Footnote 4 the latter rendered both homely and unheimlich in several books [Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, and Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn, to cite two examples])”.

Birds

The choice of birds is both accidental and productive, compelling and auspicious. The accidental, here, emerges from a body of texts that address the “Plastic Pacific.” The argument is based on a coalescing of discourses, both visual and written, around the bird as a symbol of environmental maritime waste. This has emerged from analyses of texts concerned with plastic pelagic waste (in the Pacific)—and not the other way around (i.e., looking for birds in such texts). There are some crucial precursors, which, in retrospect, suggest that this is no accidental confluence of discourses.

Other bird species—or their absence—occupy a pivotal role in discourses of extinctions. The dodo, Raphus cucullatus, acts as a symbol of extinction in various cultural texts, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo. The passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, similarly figures in (particularly U.S. American) accounts of “recent extinction” (cf. e.g., Price 1999, also Garrard 2004, 123; or in the numerous accounts in an online search for “Martha Passenger Pigeon” returns). Aepyornis maximus (the ‘elephant bird’) or Pinguinis impennis (the great auk) might also be included in such a survey, indeed, wikipedia.org includes a page titled “List of recently extinct bird species,” a rather long list. These species are examples of anthropogenic extinction, as their (cultural) histories are “[s]tories of flagship species [that] function synecdochically by pointing to broader crises in humans’ interactions with nature” (Heise 2010, 61).

Birds figure prominently in what is broadly considered a central text about environmental damage:Footnote 5 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The eponymous silence of this treaty on pollutants is a silence of birds: “There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? … It was a spring without voices …; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh” (Carson 1962, 14). Carson asks, “What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America?” (15). Here, silence transforms from a noun (a lack of sound) to a verb (an action, resulting in a lack of sound). The verb “silence” shifts from passive construction to active construction in the question: “the voices were silenced” in its question form almost shifts to an active construction: “what has silenced the voices?” Crucially, then, Carson’s is a silence not only of the birds (and other fauna); it is a silence of human response. As symbols of the (disastrous) effects of human interventions into the environment, birds have an impressive career.

Albatross

The symbolism of the albatross as a harbinger, or indeed portent, of human interaction with the creaturely world reaches back (at least) to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), where the killing of the albatross is associated with calamitous events. John Livingston Lowe notes that the poem’s intertexts include James Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777) and George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726). Lowe thus places the “Rime” “against a broad background of the circumnavigation of the world” (1955, 138); more specifically, the Pacific. James Vigus goes further, suggesting the “Rime” entails a context of disease, slavery, and colonial expansion. Accordingly, the albatross as a symbol and portent of self-inflicted damage has a long history in the (English-language, European-based) literary imagination of the Pacific. The examples I turn to in this contribution also have dead albatrosses; however, the consequences of the human actions that have led to such deaths, like the plasticity of the material that effects these deaths, shift in form and symbolism, effect and affect. As Charles Moore notes:

artifacts recovered from dead [albatross] chicks have included vintage plastic from a World War II fighter plane (the oldest identifiable pelagic plastic), toothbrushes, combs, beads, plastic buttons, checkers, golf tees, dishwashing gloves, and Magic Markers. And the most common debris object of all: plastic bottle caps, made of durable polypropylene, rarely recycled, likely to outlast us all. (2012, 220)

The images of such accumulated plastic are sufficiently graphic to make the viewers’ stomachs churn, devoid of plastic chunks as they may be.Footnote 6

Chris Jordan’s series “Midway: Message from the Gyre” comprises a series of photographs of dead birds taken on the Midway Atoll. Taken from 2009 onward, these photographs reveal the stomach contents of the dead birds: a mosaic of color; a collection of plastic. Rubbish is figured as ruinous, and the externalized waste is rendered internalized in most explicit fashion. Subdued remnants of bird share the frames with lurid pieces of plastic, exuding from their guts. The juxtaposition is startling. Feathers, bones, beaks, upon a bed of sand, all earthy tones, shades of grey and brown; these are superimposed with the greens, blues, reds, oranges, and yellows of manufactured plastic. Sometimes, the pieces of plastic are readily identifiable as objects; often enough, they are only identifiable in terms of their material, that is, as plastic (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
A photo of the remains of a bird. The photo displays bones, beaks, and feathers. The stomach region depicts plastic bottle caps and other plastic waste.

Chris Jordan’s “CF000313” (2009) from “Midway: Message from the Gyre” (http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24), © Chris Jordan

Full size image

Each photo captures individual devastation; together, they speak to a larger, systematic concern. Images from the “Midway: Message from the Gyre” have been used in advertising campaigns from Romania (e.g. Greenpeace in 2010), South Africa (e.g. Endangered Wildlife Trust in 2009), and also on the cover of the Fluter’s issue on plastic (the youth magazine published by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education [Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung] in September 2014). The use of the image in these publications is suggestive of metaphors that echo the movement of the gyre itself: dispersal, circulation, even flow. Its geographical spread further suggests the capacity of the image to affect, or to move those who look at it.

Islands of meaning coagulate around the images, visual or written. Mark Jackson suggests:

It is not that the plastics are inert (far from it—they killed the bird and present an ongoing problem to all kinds of sea-life), nor that plastics themselves are necessarily bad (again far from it—our modern lives are immeasurably better, more diverse, and manifestly abled because of them), but that as litter, their interactions pose material, and thus political and cultural, questions and demands for us. (2012, 209)

The photographs work to render the plight of the Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) less isolated, both by depicting the plastic ingested in their bodies, broaching the thousands of kilometers that separate the Midway Island atoll from the nearest continent (and, ostensibly, the source of much of the matter in their guts) and through their presence in the exemplary texts (advertising, etc.) cited above. The toxic effects of plastic circulate through these photographs of birds.

Chris Jordan’s photography has a famous precursor: the Shed Bird image (which is often displayed as a singular image comprising two photographs, as below) (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2
A photo of the remains of a bird. The photo displays bones, beaks, and feathers. The stomach region depicts stones and numerous plastic items. The plastic waste and the other things found in the stomach are exhibited on the right side of the photo.

“Shed Bird” (Liittschwager and Middleton 2005, 210–211); photograph by Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager © 2005

Full size image

The text that accompanies the famous photographs of Laysan albatross chicks in the volume, aptly entitled Archipelago, is composed by Liittschwager. He argues that the photographic findings fly in the face of a study which concluded, as Liittschwager quotes, “that ‘ingested plastic probably does not cause significant direct mortality in Laysan albatross chicks’” (Liittschwager and Middleton 2005, 212). Susan Freinkel writes: “Every carcass seems a mockery of the natural order: a crumbling bird-shaped basket of bleached bones and feathers filled with a mound of gaily colored lighters and straws and bottle caps. The birds are dissolving back into the ground; the plastics promise to endure for centuries” (2011, 118).

The central image comprises two photographs. One half depicts a deceased Laysan albatross with an incision from the top of its breast through its belly and toward the legs. The contents are visibly dominated by plastic stuff (although still covered in brown slime, possibly residue from stomach acids and other fluids). Some of this plastic is readily identifiable; an orange cigarette lighter and a red bottle-cap remain discernible, for example. The image comprises a second photograph to the right, depicting the contents of the stomach, cleaned of the brown residue and carefully arranged in an almost perfect circle. Several items distinguishable as objects work to link the two parts of the image: the orange cigarette lighter, for instance, is a prominent example of an object that does this work. Further objects become recognizable through the cleaning that has taken place,Footnote 7 others, in particular the vibrant green residua, work to link the two parts of the image without being readily recognizable as particular objects. Almost all of the pieces displayed here are recognizable as plastic fragments.Footnote 8 The aesthetics—the white background in particular—suggest an almost clinical setting, and in fact the circle of objects carries the caption “mosaic of death.”Footnote 9

The “death” obviously references the death of the young albatross, the “Shed Bird” specimen; however, the lack of qualifier or pronoun suggests not just this individual death, but death on a broader scale. The image of the contents of the young albatross’ stomach thus proffers a metonymical reading, underscored by the caption’s indefinite death. This is death both of a specific organism (whose representational impact is key to this chapter) and of biotic life in general (human and otherwise). Laid against a white background—clinical white, evoking hospitals and by extension the morgue—the plastic, in pieces, testifies to a pathology, of both consumption and toxicity.

Gillian Whitlock, in her work on testimonial transactions in postcolonial life narratives, draws attention to the metaphor of bearing witness: the dialogic and rhetoric of testimony pulls the addressee into the account, transferring a weight of responsibility and affect (2015, 8). Note, specifically, the verbs I use to articulate her argument—“draw,” “pull into,” “transferring weight”—all verbs of movement. Linguistically, and conceptually, “bearing witness” entails shifts of burdens as items that have volume and weight, as well as shifts in sensitivities and affects. The linguistic and conceptual blurriness works to foreground movement and moving, the double sense of the “Moving (the) Masses” of the subtitle to this contribution. Viewing these images, bearing witness is complicated by the non-visual nature of the subject matter, that is, the difficulties of representing the “Plastic Pacific.” It can only be “captured” by symbols and icons. Regarding Chris Jordan’s photographs, Stacy Alaimo observes:

Since we cannot see mercury or other chemicals within sea mammals, these photographs stand as vivid recognition of transcorporeality—animal bodies invaded by terrestrial, human consumerism, revealing the swirling natural–cultural agencies, the connection between ordinary terrestrial life and ocean ecologies, and the uneven distribution of harm. (2012, 488)

The evocative capacity of the photographs is perhaps what makes them so powerful: the blurring boundaries of transcorporeality, the shifting inter-action of bird and plastic, reach beyond that which is documented to evoke connections across the Plastic Pacific.

Rubber Duck

In written accounts, it is more often another “species” of bird that is mobilized to represent plastic waste: the rubber duck. The rubber duck does not pull the same high-literary weight as the albatross, with its literary and travel-writing associations, although it does figure more prominently in popular culture, particularly well known as a main character in a Sesame Street episode with Ernie’s ballad of bath-time fun.

Donovan Hohn suggests that the emergence of the rubber duck in its particular form with its particular associations, that is, as a lurid yellow plastic creature for use as a bath-time toy, is a coincidence of material culture and practices: specifically, the “invention” of celluloid in 1871, the introduction of Pekin ducks to the U.S.A. in 1873, and, following the 1880s, the increasing incorporation of bathtubs and indoor plumbing in middle-class households in the U.S.A. The rubber duck, Hohn’s brief narrative suggests, was inserted into bath-time in order to distract small children from playing with their genitals, in a story that intertwines physical health and cleanliness with mental hygiene (Hohn 2012, 224–226). The cultural symbolism of the rubber duck is rather more innocuous than that of the albatross. It is this very imagined naiveté which is mobilized in the written accounts to great effect.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano’s Flotsametrics and the Floating World references the rubber duck as part of a “flotilla” or “mini-menagerie” (2009, 78) of toys arriving at Sitka, Alaska. A photograph, included on page 80 of the hardcover edition, shows Ebbesmeyer together with Jim Ingraham smiling as they sit in a pool of toys recovered from the container: the ducks are, by virtue of their light color, the most obvious of the toys depicted in the black-and-white photograph. Their smiles speak perhaps more to the enjoyment of bath-time toys than to the problems of pelagic waste outlined in this account. As Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano note, the “bath toys inspired even more public enthusiasm than the shoes” (2009, 80; in reference to a lost contingent of Nike shoes that washed up on North America’s Pacific shores), which they suggest is due to the yellow ducky’s status as an “icon of whimsy, nostalgia, childhood innocence, and pop-cultural kitsch” (80). Another book, a 2010 boardbook by artist Eric Carle of The Hungry Little Caterpillar fame, manages to narrate the story of ten lost rubber duckies as a tale of home-coming, rather than as problematic waste, which consolidates the duck’s iconic status.Footnote 10

In Donovan Hohn’s Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, the rubber duck figures as a central symbol and index of pelagic plastic waste. In his prologue, Hohn notes:

I’d never heard of the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. … I just wanted to learn what had really happened, where the toys had drifted and why. I loved the part about containers falling off a ship, the part about the oceanographers tracking the castaways with the help of far-flung beachcombers. (2012, 3)

His book-long account of his search for one of the 7200 rubber ducks (which, along with the same number of red beavers, green frogs, and blue turtles were lost off a ship in the Pacific in January 1992) draws heavily on its obvious precursor in Herman Melville, as the title already indicates. Hohn offers a cogent account of oceanography and Pacific waste clean-up projects, but never finds a duck: the rubber duck, in this account, remains omnipresent as a function yet simultaneously absent as a material object or form. Its movement through the Pacific not only acts as a marker for the movements of the Gyre, but also as a reminder of the links between bath-time water (and toys) and the global movements of goods.

Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie’s book also mobilizes the rubber duck as an “innocuous household icon[]” (2009, xvi) along with baby bottles and other quotidian items. Called Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things, the authors undertake a project of self-exposure to harm similar to that popularized in Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me or in Michael Moore’s works (see Smith and Lourie 2009, 2). The rubber duck figures as an image around which debates about the harm of phthalates coalesce.

The cover of their book shows a plastic rubber duck that has been incorporated into a minimalistic diagram, with labels showing the presence of heavy metals—chromium and lead—and other toxic elements such as bromine and chlorine, as well as phthalates, that is, the component of plastic that originally made it soft and plasticky. The effect of the cover, foreshadowing the findings of the experimental exposure depicted in the text, is to remind the reader of the dangers of everyday exposure to substances present (and seeping out of) seemingly innocent objects.

Referencing the “Rubber Duck Wars” between consumer groups and lobbyists in California, then on the U.S. national stage, the second chapter title emphasizes the rubber duck “[a]s one of the most charismatic phthalates sources around, the yellow icon, beloved by Sesame Street alumni everywhere, [which] took centre stage in the ongoing U.S. phthalates debate” (Smith and Lourie 2009, 57). Two photographs are included from the protests that comprised the “Rubber Duck Wars”: both display rubber ducks. One shows a hand-drawn sign with “No Yucky in my [picture of rubber duck],” the other a button with the slogan “Save the Rubber Duckies” (58).

The rubber duck of the title and cover page image, as well as images evoked in the chapter on phthalates, are mobilized to specific effect: the rubber duck stands not for the gyre, as it does in Hohn’s (and other) accounts, but for toxicity. In conjunction with the other images of the rubber duck in the Pacific (and beyond), the “Birds of the Plastic Pacific” are rendered not immobile as the plastic of the duck might suggest, but rather insidiously mobile, refusing to be contained.

Birds Again: Motif, Motivation, Mobilization

The Plastic Pacific, my rendering of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, its waste, toxins, and floating, seeping plastic, poses a significant challenge to representations because it assembles issues so disparate: pollution, toxins, species threats, flotsam and jetsam, marine waste, tsunami debris, nuclear fallout,Footnote 11 etc. I find it telling, nevertheless, that many of the representations that try to come to terms with the Plastic Pacific—whether as pollution, toxin, or jetsam—coagulate around images of birds, particularly aquatic ones. As Patricia Yaeger, in a 2010 “Editor’s Column” of the PLMA, suggests: “It is impossible to find a seabird without a little product inside or a square foot of ocean without debris” (2010, 528). We might ask ourselves, then, what these images, these motifs, entail.

Motif, or leitmotif, has visual implications, in the sense of a pattern or design, but it is also used in music, for a succession of notes or a brief melodic or rhythmic pattern. Motif, like motive, derives from the late Latin motivus from the verb movere, “to move.” It is also etymologically related to “motivation.” Specific motifs of the texts, including those that do not readily fall into the category of “image,” thus move and motivate: the double meaning of the title of this contribution comes into play again.

By harnessing the “moving” of the etymology of the term “motif,” three aspects in particular emerge: first, the way in which these motifs shift through scales (of space, time, and other dimensions), and how mobility is central to such shifts. Birds, particularly birds of flight, are imagined to connect disparate sites through their flight patterns and migratory journeys. They forge relations. In a terrestrially biased world,Footnote 12 these birds constitute a flight of fancy that connects land, water, and sky.

Second, “moving,” together with “motivation,” stresses the capacity of motifs to effect responses. This is in line with the activist or “concerned cultural agent” component of many of the texts I have analyzed here, but also recollects the particular way certain motifs gain traction in conjunction with certain issues, and the ways they might affect readers. Where the Laysan albatross of Chris Jordan’s series and David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton’s iconic image have been mobilized to elicit responses of compassion, for a site on the Midway Islands, far away from most of us,Footnote 13 the rubber ducky, in conjunction, brings the Plastic Pacific much closer to home. In my case: quite literally, a rubber ducky swimming in a sea of colored nurdles, encased in a plastic ball.

Third, a motif might not reference a particular word or visual impression evoked by a dyadic semiotics of referentiality, but a patterning. This might be a material patterning (e.g., birds might be evoked by synecdoche, i.e., feathers or beaks, or by metonymy, allegory or other rhetorical figures), or a patterning of materiality. To the extent that birds are contained as bodies of matter, they are also linked through objects that materialize through flows of consumption and desire. To the extent that they are discrete biota, materialized for a lifetime in a particular form, they are linked through the unknown toxins that seep from plastic and the dangers that manifest in rigid, object forms. The Birds of the Plastic Pacific thus “move (the) masses” by forging new relations through their dimensional and conceptual mobility, in their forms and through the ways they form discourses. The birds move as plastic, are moved by plastic, all the while exhibiting plasticity.