A beach in Mumbai in 2019. | Hemanshi Kamani/Reuters
The many forms of petrochemical-derived polymers known as plastic are everywhere. Plastics, like other materials and commodities, have what many might term – after anthropologist Arjun Appadurai – rich “social lives”. They are engineered and produced for particular purposes, part of diverse material cultures and patterns of use and consumption. Post-consumption, they are further discarded and exchanged as part of diverse economies and ecologies.
Nowhere is the ubiquity of plastics as visible or anxiety-inducing in popular representations as oceans, seas, and other settings often understood as nature separate from human activity. As plastics, oils and other materials sink, break down, float and accumulate unevenly with the rhythms of water, they can travel for long periods of time and across far distances, bringing human and non-human lives across time and space into relation.
‘Cities in water’ A transdisciplinary project looks to transform the current climate crisis into future possibilities for India’s coastal cities. A 2013 flash flood coursed through Himalayan villages in the state of Uttarakhand, killing over 6,000 people and leaving tens of thousands stranded. Scientists attributed the event to climate change a combination of heavy rain, a warm, loose groundcover of snow, and glacial instability. Here, the village of Gangotri is shown on June 13 just a few days before what was termed the “Himalayan Tsunami.” (Image: Mathur/da Cunha)
On the western edge of Mumbai, over a landscape of marshlands and mangroves, construction on an 18-mile-long coastal road snakes its way up out of the silt. The $3 billion development is one of India’s most ambitious infrastructure projects: a proposal to create land out of water, a highway on stilts over the Arabian Sea. An eight-lane freeway