had already disintegrated. Every time he lowered his net he caught in its fine mesh “a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments.”
Moore didn’t discover this “plastic-plankton soup,” as he called it; since before Jules Verne invented Captain Nemo, oceanographers have known that convergence zones collect debris, and since the 1960s they’ve been worried about the persistence of “pelagic plastic,” which they’ve found in all the oceans of the world, including the Arctic. What Moore did discover were greater quantities of pelagic plastic than anyone suspected were out there. In 2001, he published a paper about his research in a scientific journal called the Marine Pollution Bulletin. The undramatic title, “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre,” belied its dramatic findings. The total dry weight of plastic Moore’s samples contained—424 grams—was six times greater than the total dry weight of plankton and half again as much as any similar study had previously found. Moore and his coauthors proposed two hypotheses to explain these results: either the concentrations of plastic in this part of the ocean are aberrantly high, or else “the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing over time.” Subsequent research has shown that both hypotheses are likely correct: the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing, in convergence zones especially.
Out on his front lawn, as I was leaving, I asked the heavyset Dr. E. what he thought of Ten Little Rubber Ducks. Despite the ominous future he’d augured in that handful of plastic dust, he thought Carle’s cheerful picture book was “delightful,” and he hoped that it would “make the ocean fun to kids.” He did have one criticism. He couldn’t figure out why Carle along with just about everyone else seemed compelled to turn the four Floatees into rubber ducks. Coverage of the story in newspapers and magazines almost always showed a picture of a solitary rubber duck, and usually not even the right kind of duck. What was wrong with the three other animals? “Maybe it’s a kind of bigotry,” Ebbesmeyer speculated. “Speciesism.”
Ebbesmeyer loaned me a set of the toys that had survived his experiments, to be returned when I was done with them. I have been carrying them around with me ever since, and they are at present perched before me on my desk as I write. Monochromatic and polygonal in a Bauhaus sort of way, they bear little resemblance to the rubber ducks in Carle’s book or, for that matter, to any other toy animal I’ve seen. Though blow-molded out of a rigid plastic (low-density polyethylene, I would eventually learn), they look whittled from wax by some tribal artisan.
The frog’s four-fingered hands (the left smaller than the right) seem folded in prayer. The limbs of the turtle are triangular stubs, its shell a domed puzzle of hexagons and pentagons. The duck’s head, too large for the flat-bottomed puck of a body it sits on, is imperfectly spherical, the flat plane of its beak continuing like a crew-cut mohawk over the top of the skull. Poke an axle through the duck’s puffed cheeks and its head would make a good wheel. Wildly out of scale and dyed a lurid, maraschino red, the beaver seems altogether out of place in this menagerie, a mammalian interloper from somebody’s acid trip. A seam left by the split mold bisects all four animals asymmetrically, and there’s a little anal button of scarred plastic where the blow pin, that steel umbilicus, withdrew.
CUTE NEIGHBORS
“Why do precisely these objects we behold make a world?” Thoreau wonders in Walden. “Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?” Since Thoreau’s time ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Walden Woods has grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are “beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.”
The word synthetic in its current sense of “chemically unnatural” would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication of Walden and three years after the invention of celluloid, the first industrial synthetic