As Nick Caverly writes in this series, the toxic impacts of dust are lagged and uncertain because it can so easily be blown or washed away Michelle Murphey (2016) vividly describes the way in which chemical pollution is displaced not only spatially but temporally, ‘such that accountabilities exceed the scope of individual lives, bioaccumulating or persisting over time, across regulatory regimes, beyond research grants and into the conjectural future.” One way of doing the difficult work of imagining environmental destruction-so often delayed, anonymous and dispersed-that I would like to explore here, is through the idea of oceanic drift.ĭrift, as a slow, fluid movement along lateral and three-dimensional currents a languorous and unpredictable move from one place to another a spatial and temporal lag. It is often very difficult to adequately represent environmental destruction, because it happens so slowly and anonymously-and the ability to imaginatively represent is politically important, linked to abilities to prevent and prosecute (Nixon 2011).

And, a recent scan of the floor of the Pacific Ocean which revealed that even the deepest parts of the ocean, up to four miles down, are littered with humanity’s detritus. Most famously, the now familiar plastic island in the Pacific, made up of vast quantities of slowly broken-down plastic collected in an ocean gyre, so large as to be visible from space. But that sublime image-wild, limitless, outside-is pockmarked by reminders of both past and distant disposals. The ocean’s vastness, viscerally encountered and culturally reproduced, has seemed a guarantee of disappearance. The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste-including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the vast quantities of sand and earth displaced into continental margins by harbor dredging, and the irredeemable byproducts of nuclear reactions secretly sunk.

Drift by Sharon Carter Rogers