Plastic debris and its effects on the environment, and the "plasti-sphere"
"For untold millennia, floating, terrestrial plant matter, whether large and solitary tree trunks or smaller shrubs and stems with soil still attached, as well as matted masses of these materials, have freely voyaged, traversed and dispersed across the open oceans just as ‘sea beans’ (see Gunn & Dennis 1999, p. 3); logs, pumice and other natural flotsam continue so to do to this day. ‘Floating Islands’ with cargoes that include exotic plants and vertebrate animals have been recognized since medieval times (see Van Duzer 2004). Through the distant past to modern times, these materials have also attracted a diverse biota of sessile and motile marine organisms—freedom travellers (hitch-hikers and hangers-on if one likes). This process has been a mechanism in the slow trans-oceanic dispersal of marine and some terrestrial organisms; e.g. Wheeler’s (1916) report of ants carried in a floating log from the mainland of Brazil to offshore San Sebastian Island. Similarly, Ingólfsson (2000) has demonstrated that rafting on floating clumps of seaweed around Iceland may see inter-tidal species dispersed for considerable distances offshore. The hard surfaces of pelagic plastics provide an attractive and alternative substrate for a number of opportunistic colonizers. With the quantities of these synthetic and non-biodegradable materials in marine debris increasing manifold over the last five decades, dispersal will be accelerated and prospects for invasions by alien and possibly aggressive invasive species could be enhanced"
- Environmental implications of plastic debris in marine settings—entanglement, ingestion, smothering, hangers-on, hitch-hiking and alien invasions by Murray R. Gregory (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873013/)
Plastic Ingestion by Birds
https://www.blastic.eu/knowledge-bank/impacts/plastic-ingestion/birds/
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24
Airborne Microplastics
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-airborne-microplastics-now-spiral-around-globe-180977510/
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/16/e2020719118
Microplastic effects on plants
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.15794
From my research, it seems we are living in a plasti-sphere. Inspired by the geologically-recognised part-plastic rock the 'plastiglomerate', this idea of the plasti-sphere acknowledges the loss of a division between the natural and the plastic. Like the sand and the molten plastic moulded together to form the plastiglomerate, the inescapable existence of microplastics in almost every aspect of the earth (new research suggests even plants may contain microplastics) the combination of these two sides of the nature/culture binary is a new frighteningly glued-together reality.