Page - 22 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

show that tiny plastic particles have become ubiquitous in different environments, such as the air, and also in fresh water and the soil. Although there is more and more data about concentra- tions of microplastics in different environments, the impact of micro- and nanoplastics on the ecosystem, species and even the human body is still very unpredictable. Science, politics and activism have to deal with “mutant ecologies” (Masco 2004), with rather unformed objects and unpredictable effects. Plastics have become part of the environment. Degraded into microscopic fragments, these tiny particles float and become sediment in the ocean or drift in the atmosphere. They are involved in the reassembling of ecosystems by forming novel aggregates and interactions with other species, or serve as a surface for small pelagic animals, algae and microbial life. In 2013, a team of marine researchers from Woods Hole in Massachusetts came up with the term “plas- tisphere” (Zettler, Mincer, and Amaral-Zettler 2013) to describe these emergent microbial lifeforms on plastics in the ocean. In these competitive environments plastics serve as a novel and attractive habitat for the creation of bacterial biofilms. This development confronts the conventional separation between what is classified as the synthetic and as the natural. There- fore, the plastisphere challenges scientific knowledge production. Novel entities and lifeforms emerge that complicate caring for these evolving environments. Whereas plastic tends to be represented as an alien intruder in environments, this neglects the ambiguous roles it also plays. Plastic in aqueous environments is a disturbing factor but also is a new habitat, a surface on which new lifeforms are created. Although bacteria here do what they always have done, namely search for durable habitats in a competitive environment to create biofilms, the role an anthropo- genic material might play in these processes is of considerable interest. It might have also a major impact on marine ecosystems as the encroachment of the Vibrio bacteria in the Baltic Sea demonstrates (Kesy et al. 2016). Notwithstanding scientific knowledge production, media representation about marine plastics diverges significantly (De Wolff 2014). This affects the image production and its underlying poli- tics of scale. Furthermore, while focusing on macroplastics (visual and coherent materialities), the problem of plastic and waste in general seems to be manageable. In contrast, the perspec- tive on microplastics and nanoplastics shows an area of rather unformed objects with uncertain effects. Nonetheless, the ocean is still viewed from the land when it comes to solutions. On the one hand, land-based ideas for waste management neglect the ocean’s fluid ontology, on the other hand they disregard the degradation of plastics into microscopic particles in the water. Regarding the presentation of the phenomenon, another obstacle is the translation of the term microplastics in ecological discussions: first, most effects of microplastics are rather unpredicta- ble. We do not fully understand how microplastics might harm the environment. Second, the term is not related and translated to people’s terrestrial experience: it seems that plastics in the ocean and our entanglement with rather coherent plastic objects in our daily lives represent two different spheres. That might change with recent monitoring of micro- and nanoplastics as dust emissions in the air or as part of the soil. Multiplying the ghosts of speculation and ambivalence The modern separation of nature and culture as theorized by Bruno Latour (2012) becomes contested regarding the accumulation of plastics in different environments. As STS researcher Banu Subramaniam (Subramaniam 2014) argues, the natural and the cultural cannot be easily 22