This is a more edited version of a journal entry I made.<\/p>\n
Vibrant Matter got me thinking about things; things as objects that have a life of their own separate from the use I get out of them. Bennet talks about how little we appreciate objects because materialism has conditioned us to just throw everything away once we have gotten use out of it. These things we throw away continue being the things they are for long after we throw them away; and for long after we stop thinking about them. That got me thinking about plastic grocery bags. Plastic grocery bags have gotten a lot of media, I remember a long time ago when people were talking about how harmful plastic bags are to the environment. They\u2019re made of petroleum products, so they\u2019re cheap, they\u2019re resilient, and they\u2019re unnatural. They are very mobile because they can fly with the wind and float in the water, so they can travel long distances without any help. We maybe only get one use out of them; carrying groceries from the store to our car into our houses, after that one use they might get used again once, twice if they\u2019re lucky, then we throw them away and they will sit in a landfill for hundreds and hundreds of years. We don\u2019t even give them a second thought when we\u2019re done using them, we just throw them away without thinking that they will exist on this planet far longer than we will because they\u2019re made of plastic that doesn\u2019t naturally break down. The plastic bag sitting on my floor right now will continue being a plastic bag long after I\u2019m dead, the things we create in the Anthropocene have immense power because as humans, we have immense power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a more edited version of a journal entry I made. Vibrant Matter got me thinking about things; things as objects that have a life of their own separate from the use I get out of them. Bennet talks about how little we appreciate objects because materialism has conditioned us to just throw everything away once we have gotten… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,41,39,42],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bennet","tag-plastic","tag-thing-power","tag-vibrant-matter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}