BOOK REVIEWS
Artist and plant whisperer Lisa Estabrook presents 44 beautiful and vivid Soulflower oracle cards with empowering messages to help you connect with your own intuition million ton benchmark of the amount of new plastics manufactured in a single year. Most plastics are still derived from hydro-carbon gas liquids extracted from petroleum products. Production is expected to exceed a billion tons annually by 2050. Literally adding injury upon injury, the industry’s global “solution” is to incinerate used plastics to ensure an ongoing demand for more plastics. To maintain the market and the ongoing demand among consumers, plus sufficient profits to the plastic manufacturers, each year’s plastic must be made obsolete and unavailable. It is a grand master plan to keep plastic in the mar - ketplace and profits in the producers’ pockets. For the fish and the birds that mistake the plastic for food and consume it and feed it to their young, theirs is a painful and tragic death from starvation. Save the Plastic Bag? Between 1972 and 1997 when the great Pacific garbage patch was “discovered,” the plastics industry “more than quadrupled its annu- al production.” According to the National Academy of Engineering, plastic “flows, floats, and blows everywhere, including downhill to the ocean forming massive accumulation zones of microplastic trash, fragmenting and cycling through entire marine ecosystems” to end up on the ocean floor or somehow washed ashore somewhere. By the mid-2000s, the industry was confronting a growing public backlash regarding the accumulation of plastics that cannot be repurposed or recycled and continued to cruelly maim and kill wildlife. The manu- facturers do all they can to thwart bans on anything plastic, even as they continue to fill the stomachs and cause the deaths of birds and fish that were nowhere near any land. Publicity campaigns sponsored by plastic manufacturers have included “Save the Plastic Bag” and “The Progressive Bag Alliance.” Trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council and their hired
REVIEWS BY ALYCE ORTUZAR
Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution
By Marcus Eriksen 2017; Beacon Press: Boston 225pp; $26.95 HB ISBN 978-0-8070-5640-0
It is 2:00 a.m. There is a storm near San Nicolas Island. In the darkness, another wave slams against the underside of the airplane strapped to fifteen thousand plastic bottles. I pull the hatch closed to avoid more spray in my face. Wa- ter now sloshes under the plywood floorboard, between the bank of batteries and beneath our damp sleeping bags. The homemade rigging moans and whistles as fifty-knot gusts rip through it. A wall of water engulfs the deck and blurs the windshield, and a cascade of echoing drips trick- les through the holes I forgot to plug. “Something’s not right,” I say. ~ Excerpted from Junk Raft The post-World War II years in America were the golden age of advertising. “Marketing mayhem” convinced the American public that they needed a television and a washing machine and the latest kitchen gadget, along with whatever products should stock a modern bomb shelter. Popular culture thus embraced two potentially calam- itous trends: patriotic consumerism premised on planned obsoles- cence combined with a throwaway mindset. The ocean expeditions described in this book sought to determine how widespread is the presence of plastics in the ocean; and what are possible solutions not only for removing them, but to keep them out of our water sources. The immense challenge this dilemma posed to these activists over- whelmed and sickened them, particularly when they came across fish in the middle of nowhere but the ocean literally stuffed fragments of plastic to their gills. There were photographs that horrified and sick - ened the public of dead sea lions and whales entangled in deteriorating plastic nets that caused them to drown; sea turtles choking on plastic bags; the rib cages of albatrosses filled with trash. Plastic pollution causes starvation and cruel deaths among marine life and sea birds. “Our fight is to put an end to the throwaway culture that has overtaken so much of our society,” including our rivers and oceans. Throwaway Versus Circular Economies These activists connected the dilemma and the challenge they con- fronted to society’s unchecked throwaway culture that has overtaken the planet in every corner. The apparent solution is daunting: to adopt “a circular economy in which little to nothing escapes unless it is be- nign or beneficial to the environment. A world without waste or wan - ton destruction made possible with “a zero waste, end-of-life design for everything we create.” In 2013, which these conservationists characterize as “the syn - thetic century,” the manufacture of plastics “broke the three-hundred
Soulflower Plant Spirit Oracle 44-Card Deck and Guidebook Lisa Estabrook
A high-vibration oracle set to help you connect with the wisdom of plant spirits and tend the garden of your soul $30.00 • Boxed Set Includes 44 full-color cards and 176-page booklet ISBN 978-1-64411-476-6
— Books for the spiritual and healing journeys since 1975 — Available wherever books are sold or shop online at innertraditions.com
66—PATHWAYS—Summer 22
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