PROVIDENCE – The story of plastics manufacturing and its link to climate change is a tale that is still being written. It is a story in which we are all participants and observers, witnesses to the severe biological changes to the world around us – from warming oceans to melting ice caps, from the growing intensity of storms, floods and forest fires to the persistent rise in temperatures across the globe, from the dramatic rise in chronic diseases linked to endocrine disruptors in our air, water and food to the spread of viruses by changing vectors of disease.

One of the foremost experts into what some have called the emergence of the anthropocene era is Rebecca Altman, author of the forthcoming book: An Intimate History of Plastics.

She is co-facilitating a writing seminar, “Narrating the Anthropocene,” with environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth for the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

The Providence-based science writer’s most recent reporting, published in Orion magazine in May of 2024, is entitled: “From War Machine to Supermarket Staple: A History of the Plastic Bag.”

The opening paragraph of her story begins: “The history of the plastic carrier bag – the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind – is a story of persuasion.”

Altman has been featured in interviews in ConvergenceRI numerous times. [See links to ConvergenceRI stories below, “A conversation with the next Rachel Carson,” “What’s entangled and enmeshed in the plastic is us,” and “Rachel Carson was right!”]

Altman told ConvergenceRI that she is still in the midst of reporting and research and writing her book, in response to emailed questions that comprise the latest interview.

ConvergenceRI: What is the status of your book? Is it finished? What is the publication timeline?    
ALTMAN: Not finished – still at it. It has been a research-intensive book. Then there’s writing that all up so that I can understand what it all means. Then there’s rewriting it into a story. And then turning it inside out so that the story is meaningful to someone other than me.

It’s my first time doing this at this scale. And, it is taking me a long, long time, longer than I would have expected. With lots of family stuff – and COVID – rearing up in the middle, pulling at my capacity and attention. I am ever grateful for a patient agent and editors, who understand the family circumstances in which I'm seeking out this book.

ConvergenceRI: Your book, with its subtitle, “An Intimate Story of Plastics,” weaves together your own story, your family’s story, and that of Primo Levi.    
ALTMAN: Yes. Two very different portraits of employment in the plastics industry, Dad making high impact [rubber modified] polystyrene for Union Carbide; Primo Levi making paints and wire coatings, his specialty, a kind of plastic called polyvinyl formal.

ConvergenceRI: You are co-leading a seminar called “Narrating the Anthropocene” with Bathsheba Demuth. Can you explain its focus? And, why is it so important to change the narrative around plastics?    
ALTMAN: Yes. It’s my first time back in the classroom since moving to Providence. This is the third time the Insitute at Brown for Environment and Society is offering this class, a senior capstone class for the Environmental Studies program.

Bathsheba Demuth previously taught the class with Elizabeth Rush – her most recent book, The Quickening, is fantastic; it’s about women and birth and Antarctica and her berth aboard a NSF-funded research trip to Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. The book before that, Rising, was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

Liz is on leave this term. So I was hired to step in for the term to co-teach this year's class with Bathsheba, an environmental historian, and as it happens, another of my very favorite writers. [We are quite fortunate in Providence to have such a remarkable community of environmental writers].

As I understand it, students requested this kind of experience a couple years back – to explore story and narrative techniques as a way to process and pull together their experiences from the prior three years of learning. So Bathsheba and Liz drafted this course in response. It is an honor to get to join in for a term. And I'm thrilled [and grateful] to be thinking about and also actively writing alongside such a talented bunch of students.

Plastics are of the category of things both deeply familiar and also deeply misunderstood. How can we begin to alter our future in relationship to plastics without a deeper sense of knowing where they came from?  What’s needed are alternate stories about plastics, not about their mythic firsts and founders, but bigger stories about the wider context of their emergence and development, and more intimate stories of the lives bound up the material, including its making.

ConvergenceRI: How has your own current family situation — sharing your home with your parents — changed your perspective about what it means to be connected?    
ALTMAN: My life is deeply entwined with that of two teens and three elders – one who lives with us, and two [my parents] who live nearby in assisted living. Their care and well-being bring meaning and also some measure of complexity to my days – while at the same time, their presence in my day-to-day life makes writing a book – even a complicated, at times hard-to-write book such as this one is for me – all the more meaningful and a place of refuge.

ConvergenceRI: In your recent story about plastic bags, you mix both poetry and science and chemistry to describe the way that plastic bags have changed our world: as you describe it, “The polyethylene bag doesn’t so much carry as it carries on.” 

What does that mean for us to understand how plastics and the manufacture of polyethylene define our culture?    
ALTMAN: I’m taken with the idea that plastic harbors the imprint of its making, of its makers, of its history.

The other day, on a panel with the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine, the moderator asked a lovely question of one of the fellow panelists: How would you explain plastics to a 12-year-old?

A polymer chemist gave an elegant answer about how to visualize the entangled molecular structure of plastics.

But I was thinking of what my own answer might have been. And, it struck me afterwards that I’d probably explain plastics in just this way.

Like, say, how a red rubberized polystyrene cup of the kind often used at parties is, in part, the history of World War Two made manifest. The war laid the infrastructure for the mass production of its primary monomer, styrene, which [especially in the U.S.] wasn’t made anywhere near the scale it was in Germany before the war, or by war’s end [thanks to the investment of the U.S. Synthetic Rubber Program], which in turn churned out the kind of rubber later added to polystyrene plastics to toughen, rubberize them.

But to answer your question more directly: these materials were designed to endure [emphasis added]. Or rather, they endure as designed. Which in turn opens up the possibility for their redesign. To be designed with their end in mind, with perhaps a different ending in mind.

Well, that's about all I have time for tonight. Course prep awaits! Thanks for your continued interest in my work, and for your support.