Reimagining Plastic Pollution and Climate Activism: Contradictions of Eco-Education in Rachel Hope Allison's I'm Not a Plastic Bag

Media coverage of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) has largely centered on the negative impacts of plastic pollution on marine life, dominated by images of sea turtles snared in discarded fishing nets and seabird corpses filled with colorful bottle caps. However, the ever-growing trash vortex, which contains an estimated 79,000 tons of plastic, also plays a significant role in the larger climate change crisis (Lebreton 1). As a 2019 report published by the Center for International Environmental Law notes, "[n]early every piece of plastic begins as a fossil fuel, and greenhouse gases are emitted at each stage of the plastic lifecycle" ("Plastic" 1). In other words, marine pollution is not a localized issue that only imperils sea creatures but a global problem that exacerbates climate change and threatens all life on Earth. In response to this developing crisis, a number of children's imagetexts—a concept encompassing picture books, comics, and other text-image narratives (Mitchell 89)—published in the last decade seek to educate young readers about the dangers of plastic marine debris. Such is the case, for instance, in the graphic novel Aquicorn Cove (2018) and in picture books The Pout-Pout Fish Cleans Up the Ocean (2019) and Suki Seal and the Plastic Ring (2020). As these titles suggest, imagetexts in this "ocean pollution" subgenre typically feature anthropomorphized animals threatened by marine pollution. Notably, they also frequently include paratexts—prefaces, postfaces, or "what can you do?" addenda—that propose practical, at-home steps that children and their parents can take to combat ocean pollution. In this capacity, the ocean pollution imagetexts serve as eco-pedagogical literature that, as Geraldine Massey and Clare Bradford observe, "respon[d] to environmental issues and attemp[t] to enlist readers in taking action, encouraging them to reflect on the world as it is, and to imagine future scenarios if environmental degradation proceeds unabated" (110).

One of the most provocative, and in several respects sui generis, works to emerge from this eco-pedagogical genre is Rachel Hope Allison's hybrid graphic novel/picture book I'm Not a Plastic Bag (2012). The narrative takes up the issue of marine pollution by portraying the toxic GPGP as an adorable, anthropomorphic monster: a mass of trash with eyes formed from a tire and an umbrella. As the story progresses, the garbage monster's size increases exponentially as more waste accumulates in it, and so does its apparent loneliness as it fails to befriend passing marine animals. Although the cover identifies I'm Not a Plastic Bag as "a graphic novel"—and indeed, many of its pages are divided into comics panels—the book also includes many full and double-paged spreads reminiscent of picture book illustrations. As such, this mostly wordless imagetext straddles the line between the two mediums, functioning as what Nathalie op de Beeck terms a "picture-bookish" comic ("Comics-Style," 468). The graphic novel similarly addresses an ambiguous audience, with the back cover deeming the content "suitable for readers of all ages," while the whimsical illustrations of the GPGP appear to specifically target elementary or middle-grade readers (Allison, emphasis in original). Even the book's publication process emphasizes hybridity, with Plastic Bag published in 2012 as part of a collaborative eco-educational effort between comics publisher Archaia and the now-defunct Jeff Corwin Connect Foundation (Allison, back cover).¹ The foundation bookends Allison's imaginative garbage monster narrative with educational paratexts that provide additional information about the GPGP, as well as a "How Can You Help?" action list that promotes simplistic, mostly local environmental activism.

The jarring juxtaposition of the fantastic primary narrative with these rather clichéd instructional paratexts presents competing stories about what counts as environmental action for children in the Anthropocene. Allison's primary narrative uses elements of the comics medium and the anthropomorphic figure of the garbage monster to transform the GPGP from an unintelligible, and thus perhaps ignored, abstraction to an exigent crisis. This emphasis on the far-reaching, cataclysmic nature of marine pollution, along...