Material Life

Oh, plastic, scourge of the Anthropocene, shaped into adorable shapes and dyed multifarious colors; plastic, who will be with us forever: it’s easy to forget about you, but when I remember you’re here, I’m annoyed and freaked out all at once.

I’ve been thinking about plastic more than usual as we prepare this Body Issue. Petrochemically derived plastic is, more and more, part of our bodies, and the evidence for its hazards grows steadily clearer. Not only does this material stick around for thousands of years, it disintegrates into smaller and smaller particles that attract and concentrate toxins in seas, soil, living things. It pervades even the air, according to studies published in 2016 and new work out this year, lodging in lungs and carrying the same toxins to those chambers. Tali Weinberg’s woven data map Bound, featured in this issue, speaks to these hazards and the hazards of climate change all at once. Beginning with plastic medical tubing, she marks out data on annual average temperatures in cities and countries around the world, then shows that data by wrapping the tubing with hand-dyed, color-coded thread.

I love this project because it does the work of linking big shifts and local effects—rising temperatures due to human-caused climate change; medical interventions meant, of course, to help, but using materials that are energetically costly to produce and that may have their own long-term ill effects as they live in our bodies. What work like Bound can help us remember is that the seemingly small—one procedure, performed on the body of a being we know and love, or on ourselves—is part of a larger trend. And, likewise, that the seemingly big and abstract effects of climate change are immediate, personally relevant. This connection, for me, wipes away old arguments about how individual action can’t help enough, how the only positive change that matters happens at the policy level. When it comes to the safety and integrity of ecological systems—which is to say, when it comes to our collective ongoingness— we need the versions of change most right-feeling to each of us: art, humor, activism.

There are a few shifts in the material life of this magazine that I’ve been wanting to make for some time. I’m happy to write that, with this issue, we’ve made a couple of them. We’ve moved from sending our subscriber mailings in what are known in the industry as polybags—those pesky plastic bags that many magazines and catalogs arrive in—to mailing in recycled-paper envelopes. If you fall on the plastic side of the paper-versus-plastic argument, I’ll say only that plastic’s long-term toxicity and straight-up long-termness make paper the winner for me.

It’s more expensive to send a magazine in paper, both because the material costs more, and because it is made for and by human bodies. A paper envelope cannot be puffed with a puff of machine-puffed air in order that another machine may place a magazine in it. It must be opened by hand, the magazine held in another hand and slid into it, so that the reader can reverse this action, open the envelope and slide it out. This symmetry of human acts is a consolation for the cost; another consolation is that some part of the additional cost will go to humans, in Pennsylvania, doing the work.

One more change: since its first issue, with the exception of last year’s letterpress-printed Craft Issue cover, Ecotone’s covers have featured what’s called matte lamination—the cover is coated in plastic meant to protect the printing, and that plastic, instead of being glossy, is dull. One kind of this lamination is called “soft touch,” a phrase calculated to make the book feel closer to our bodies. And it’s a pleasing look and feel, when you don’t think about it too hard. But the lamination in fact brings us farther from the book, inserting a layer of petrochemical stuff between the reader...