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The Great Lakes: Accumulations

These collages are part of a suite of images that serve as an introduction to The Synthetic Collective, a project led by artists, scientists, and cultural historians from Concordia and Western Universities in Canada. The Collective attempts to trace, quantify, evaluate, and visualize the extent of plastics pollution in the eco-region of the Laurentian Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes on earth and contain 21% of the earth’s surface fresh water. They exist in a region of intense industrial activity and traverse Canadian and American national borders. The collective is working across several disciplines, to develop a more tangible understanding of plastics pollution as a wicked problem, one that is both a local and global systemic issue, yet also a potential site for protection, innovation, and remediation. The speed and breadth of plastics accumulation in global bodies of water outmatches any other form of physical environmental waste (Liboiron 2016; Moore 2011). According to a recent article by Alexander Driedger et al. (2015), which summarized current scientific knowledge on plastics pollution in the Laurentian Great Lakes, “Open-water surveys reveal that, in certain areas of the Great Lakes, surface water densities of plastics are as high as those reported for areas of litter accumulation within oceanic gyres. Data from volunteer beach cleanups show that typically more than 80% of anthropogenic litter along the shorelines of the Great Lakes is comprised of plastics.” In addition, “The distribution of plastics in bottom sediments of the Great Lakes is essentially unknown.” The scale of this plastics waste is for the most part occluded, or made nearly invisible to the naked eye, by virtue of plastic’s near indistinguishability from other proximate natural decompositions and sediments (Andrews 2007; Glausiusz 2014; MacBride 2011; Yong 2013). Plastic waste maps onto a visible/invisible continuum, on the one hand characterized by elaborate excess, and on the other by near invisibility. These structural violences to our environments can be slow to register on the ground, and slow to emerge