How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Disposable Plastic
by Guy Zimmerman
At a party at the Edendale Grill in Silverlake shortly before Christmas I learned about the five vortexes of disposable plastic, vast as continents and indestructible, that swirl continuously in the world’s oceans. I was talking to a woman named Sara Bayles who, in the hope of drawing attention to the problem, collects plastic trash choked up by the sea each day on Santa Monica beach. The image of the vortexes seemed to echo, dreamlike, the armada of environmental alarms that have circulated below the surface of my emotional life since childhood. And yet, at the Edendale, I noticed that something had shifted. Confronted with new evidence of environmental degradation the familiar cocktail of resignation, sorrow and species-shame did not taste quite so bitter. I have come to connect this shift to a concept that first bubbled up into the mind stream of pop culture only in the last decade or so: emergence.
Tibet Fractels
A central idea in new arenas of scientific inquiry with daunting names like “complexity theory” and “integrative levels” emergence is tricky to capture in words, much less experience directly. The Wikipedia definition reads: “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Hurricanes, the world wide web and the architecture of termite colonies in the Kalahari desert are commonly cited examples of complex emergent systems. But your ability to read this sentence (and my ability to compose it) could also be viewed as an “emergent” property of the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms that, arranged in a very specific way, make up our bodies. That the material world has the capacity to generate surprising new forms in this fashion makes emergence something close to a theory of miracles, reconciling the material and the mysterious.
At the Edendale Sara Bayles and I were surrounded by practitioners of yoga, which is all about balancing body and mind, material and mystery. The party was a send off for a mutual friend named Tara Judelle, a teacher of asana practice who happens to be particularly focused on these issues. And so, at the Edendale, the idea of emergence reminded me of the embodied process of learning yoga, and how that process is not linear at all. Your body initially fights a pose… you make a series of micro adjustments…and then one day the pose simply reveals itself and you shift into a more refined alignment. It’s this sudden leaping into a new level of order that connects this experience to the concept of emergence. And there’s a correlate in meditation practice too – breath by breath you rest your awareness on a challenging thought or emotional pattern and after an eternity has come and gone you are surprised to experience an abrupt shift. A transformative insight emerges; you are drawn back more fully toward a non-dual experience of the present moment.
In recent months, Tara has been giving special focus to the organ body – being aware, for example, of how your kidneys align during trikonasana, or how your liver curves against your back ribs during a seated twist. Unlike muscle and bone, the organs are formidably complex entities. It can be unsettling but also enlightening to contemplate how these astonishing tissue-matrixes we lug around evolved over eons to do what they now do for us, which is to support the awareness that allows us to reflect on our experiences, question the meaning of our lives and engage with each other in a chaotic world. In a standing pose one day I had a visceral (literally) sense of the furious busy-ness of evolution, the constant, bubbling creative activity – trying this, shifting to that, juggling this, abandoning that to move over here and try this – that has animated our long evolution, and along with that recognition came the sense that darker energies must also be a part of this tapestry; that this creative activity needs some destructive capacity too or things would get too locked in and static, and while there may be no way for that destructive aspect to be pleasant or positive in-and-of-itself it remains still a part of this larger creative unfolding. 
And so on balance we human beings should feel honored to be the vehicles (one of them at any rate) through which the material universe can turn and look at itself, contemplate and praise itself, and that many of our emotional and psychological challenges stem from the sort of jury-rigged, boot-strapped, emergent nature of the operation, where this creative principle managed to arrange the carbon molecules in such a way that they formed into complex nucleic acids that then lined up in the astonishingly complex arrays of RNA and DNA and then somehow, down the line, these strands of DNA gave rise to things called synapses and neurons which then gathered into brains and the whole rickety contraption continued to build on up through the different life forms until finally, with a certain species of mammals called primates, the brains reached a size where the skulls that contained them could barely squeeze out through the hip opening of the female, giving birth to an awareness that, still in the process of forming, was sensitive enough to be deeply scarred by the trauma of birth, and then again by the trauma of its extended dependency on unreliable adults, and then yet again from all the other traumas that follow birth such that human beings tend to experience themselves as separate, apart and terminally embattled, threatened and insecure and defined by a sense of lack such that collective life tended to ignite frequently into the most bloody conflicts imaginable and history became a sequence of wars, and of incessant conquest and domination, a cycle of violence building in ferocity until finally, in the name of survival, the species learned how to sublimate the violence into economic systems such as Capitalism that generated the technologies of convenience that have left vortexes of plastic swirling in the middle of the gorgeous deep blue oceans.
And yet something new is emerging in the human realm and many of us sense it. The material sciences are everywhere bumping up against phenomenon that undermine the top down nature of their own inquiries. One of the scientists most engaged in unpacking this aspect of emergence is the biologist Stuart Kaufman. Kaufman views emergence as a challenge to the reductionism that has defined the scientific view since Galileo. To explain reductionism, Kaufman quotes Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg: “the ‘explanatory arrows always point downward’, from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics…” With emergence scientists have started looking back in the opposite direction, working outward from the smallest particles to the complex structures that arise out of them in unpredictable ways.
Galileo Before the Inquisition. 1847
In a move that is sure to tweak a few goatees in the citadels of science, Kaufman, an atheist, proposes appropriating the word “God” and applying it “not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.” “I want God,” Kaufman writes, “to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.” While I’m not sure we need to befog ourselves all over again with a lot of symbolic baggage (and I would argue that this creative force should be embodied as a female rather than a male deity), I do appreciate Kaufman’s sense of urgency. As Sara Bayles underscored for me, smiling, at the Edendale, there is no quick fix for problem such as the swirling vortexes of plastic. Despite my new year’s resolution to forgo plastic bottles, the vortexes will continue to grow for years and probably decades to come.
To survive the patch of environmental “bumpiness” that is surely coming we will need something to pray to and we will need all the miracles the universe can provide. We certainly can no longer afford to view ourselves as disembodied minds separate from experience and the exclusive authors of our own actions. The emergent view underscores that even our ignorance is an inseparable part of a larger story defined at every turn by surprise. It might be that a new capacity for non-dualistic experience will emerge in time for us to respond to the mess we are making of the world. The reductionist view of Western science has managed to give us an array of potent technologies and knowledge, and perhaps now, under the gun, we will locate the wisdom to use these tools effectively. While optimism and pessimism are equally beside the point, why not embrace the idea that we are about to emerge as a wiser species? We’ve already broken the eggs, we might as well cook up the omelette.
Below are organizations that bring awareness to the problem of plastic vortexes in our oceans:
5Gyres
Blue Ocean Institute
Plastic Pollution Coalition
Green Peace-The Trash Vortex
National Geographic
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