by Hristo Yordanov Originally written in 2020, revised for publication in 2026
In July 2016, a Canadian energy company spilt over 200,000 litres of oil mixed with diluent chemicals into the North Saskatchewan River (see pic. 1). The toxic flow moved downstream past cities and towns, triggering emergency drinking-water measures across entire urban territories. The fish died. Foam and tar washed up on riverbanks. Residents reported that birds and wildlife disappeared from the surrounding area for months afterwards. It was a visible, localised disaster, but its logic was planetary.
We live in the Anthropocene: the geological epoch defined by human activity’s impact on Earth systems. We have the power, as Anna Tsing writes, to change the face of the planet itself. And we are using it through climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification, freshwater contamination and the slow accumulation of pollutants that do not degrade within any human timescale. Newton’s Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The question this essay asks is simple and disturbing: What is the Earth’s reaction to ours?
This is not an abstract question. It is being answered in river water, in beach sand, in the flesh of farmed fish, in the air, on factory floors. And it is being answered, too, in contemporary art: in porcelain puddles on gallery floors, in geological samples displayed as sculpture, in video works that make the invisible visible. This essay traces a journey from the oil-soaked banks of the North Saskatchewan to the salmon farms of the Scottish Highlands, following the thread of toxicity through landscape, ecology and art practice.
Oil and water
The Saskatchewan spill was dramatic enough to make international news. But Zoe Todd, writing about fish, legal governance and human-nature relations in Canada, places such events within a longer and more structural argument. The crisis was not an accident so much as an expression of a system in which fossil fuel extraction treats rivers, lands and waters as resources rather than living ecologies.
The oil industry, as Todd and others have argued, turns ancient fossils into contemporary risks. The liquefied extracts of the Earth’s deep time, not just oil and gas but the plastics derived from petrochemical processing, now permeate every ecosystem on the planet. What flows into the Saskatchewan flows eventually into the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, joining the global water cycle and becoming everyone’s problem.
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei responded to this reality with Oil Spills (2006), an installation of giant porcelain objects shaped to resemble puddles of black oil pooled on a gallery floor (see pic. 2). The objects are shiny, dark and heavy; they are also easy to overlook, which is precisely the point. Visitors who do not look down pass them by. The work implicates the inattentive viewer in the same casual disregard that allows environmental catastrophe to proceed unnoticed. Porcelain, a material with deep roots in Chinese craft tradition, becomes a vehicle for ecological critique: beautiful, toxic in its manufacture, permanent in its presence.
Plastiglomerate – the new geology
From rivers to beaches. Kamilo Beach in Hawaii is one of the ocean’s endpoints, a place where currents deposit the accumulated debris of global consumption. Over 90 per cent of the material that washes ashore there has a plastic origin. The beach is not a beach in any familiar sense. It is an archive of human waste (see pic. 3).
In 2012, geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac visited Kamilo Beach. They found something new: a material they named “plastiglomerate”, a fusion of volcanic rock, sand, seashells and plastic particles melted together by heat into a single composite object. These samples are neither natural nor artificial. They are both simultaneously. They are what happens when human time collides with geological time.
Kirsty Robertson, writing in E-flux Journal, argues that plastiglomerate marks a stratigraphic boundary, physical evidence embedded in the Earth’s layers that a new era has begun. Corcoran and Jazvac drew this line on the Anthropocene. The samples they collected at Kamilo Beach were later exhibited by Jazvac as sculptural ready-made objects: found things that are also made things, natural formations that are also human artefacts.
The toxic component is the microplastic content. Microplastic fragments under 5mm in size are not a specific type of plastic but a condition that all plastics eventually reach. They degrade slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years. They enter water systems, food chains, and bodies. They are, as Pam Longobardi writes, “the cultural archaeology of our time, a future storehouse of oil, and the future fossils of the Anthropocene.”
Microplastic Pollution – an artist’s response
The video below is my own response to these realities, a one-minute video artwork made in 2020, representing the planetary scale of microplastic pollution. It is not beautiful. It is not intended to be. The visual language of garbage, decay and accumulation mirrors its subject directly: the change that results from overproduction, non-biodegradable materials and the unending cycle of waste.
The ocean currents that move pollution around the world also move temperature, climate and the invisible fragments of human manufacturing. This is not localised contamination. It is a form of colonisation, one that operates at scales invisible to the naked eye, embedding itself in the bodies of every living organism on the planet.
The toxic table
From beaches to dinner plates. There is no separation between sea life and land life, and nowhere is this more tangible than in the salmon farming industry.
The natural salmon population has declined sharply over recent decades, driving the expansion of industrial fish farming. Salmon is now one of the most widely consumed fish globally, but the salmon on supermarket shelves carries a complex and largely hidden history. Biochemistry toxicology researcher Jerome Ruzzin, testing multiple food groups sold in Norway (see pic. 5), found that farmed salmon contained five times more toxins than any other product tested – including hamburger, eggs and cod.
The mechanism is systemic. Fish farms are often heavily polluted, overcrowded environments. Pesticides reduce oxygen levels. Bacteria proliferate. Chemicals interact. Fish become sick, and sick fish are treated with antibiotics, which the bacteria gradually become resistant to, requiring ever-higher doses. Antibiotics absorbed into fish tissue are later released back into surrounding waters. Some farmed fish develop genetic mutations, resulting in more fat in the flesh, which absorbs higher concentrations of pollutants. And because naturally pink flesh would be grey in farm conditions, food colourants are used to make the product look as it should look in nature.
The contemporary art duo Cooking Sections: Daniel Pascual and Alon Schwabe addressed this industrial sleight of hand in Salmon: A Red Herring, an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2020 and their ongoing CLIMAVORE project, which critically examines sustainable food systems and the environmental consequences of salmon farming (see pic. 4). One installation piece, SalmoFan, displayed the commercial colour-matching tool used by fish farmers to select the desired pigment for salmon flesh: a fan of orange-to-grey gradients that resembles a Pantone swatch book. The work makes the manipulation visible. It also had a direct consequence: as a result of the exhibition, farmed salmon was removed from menus across all Tate sites.
Once part of the largest natural salmon habitats in Britain, the Isle of Skye now hosts industrial fish farms among its glaciers and sea lochs. The wildlife, sea eagles, dolphins, puffins, and seals remain extraordinary. But under the surface, the ecosystem tells a different story.
Art as witness
Starting from the Canadian rivers, through Hawaiian sandy beaches, Norwegian glaciers and Scottish islands, this is an ecological journey that marks some of the most urgent and least visible crises of modern life. What connects these places is not geography but toxicity: the slow, systemic, largely invisible poisoning of the world’s water systems by human industrial activity.
Contemporary art cannot reverse this. But it can make it visible. Ai Weiwei’s porcelain puddles, Jazvac’s geological ready-mades, Cooking Sections’ colour swatches – each work performs a kind of attention, asking the viewer to look down, to look closer, to notice what is easily overlooked. This is not art as activism in any simple sense. It is art as witness – a practice of careful, sustained looking in an age that rewards speed and surface.
Newton’s Third Law holds. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The question is whether we will recognise the reaction before it becomes irreversible.
We exist inside a narrow living organism. We are part of a complex ecological system that has absorbed our activity for centuries and is now beginning to reflect it back at us – in contaminated rivers, in beaches made of plastic, in the grey flesh of farmed fish. The industrialisation and capitalism of the past two centuries have changed landscapes, wiped out habitats, and interfered with ecosystems at every scale.
The contemporary art world has many faces. Some are beautiful as a rising sun or an ocean wave. Others draw careful, uncomfortable attention to what we are doing to the world we share. Both matter, but the latter, right now, may matter most.
Toxicity does not announce itself. It accumulates quietly, invisibly, in water and tissue and sediment, until one day it becomes the condition of everything. The role of art – perhaps its most essential role in this moment – is to make that accumulation visible before it becomes irreversible. To name what we would prefer not to see. To hold the mirror up not to human vanity but to human consequence.
We are running out of time to look away.
References
- Chen, Mel Y. (2012) Following Mercurial Affect. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, pp. 189-221.
- Cooking Sections (2020) Salmon: A Red Herring. Tate Britain, Art Now.
- Fadini, G.P. (2011) Chronic Consumption of Farmed Salmon Containing Persistent Organic Pollutants Causes Insulin Resistance and Obesity in Mice.
- Haraway, Donna (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene. Environmental Humanities 6: 159-65.
- Mascarelli, Amanda (2012) Environment: Toxic effects. Nature.
- Robertson, Kirsty (2016) Plastiglomerate. E-flux Journal no. 78.
- The Physics Classroom. Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
- Todd, Zoe (2014) Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada. Etudes/Inuit/Studies 38(1-2): 217.
- Todd, Zoe (2017) Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Volume 43.
- Tsing, Anna (2016) Earth Stalked by Man. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 34(1): 2-16.
- Yordanov, Hristo (2020) Microplastic Pollution.
Image credits
- pic. 1 – River oil pollution – illustrative image. Oil Spill During Missouri River Flooding. Photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie. Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons
- pic. 2 – Ai Weiwei, Oil Spills, 2006. Glazed porcelain, dimensions variable. Photo: Richard Eriksson, CC BY 2.0. Source: Flickr
- pic. 3 – Marine litter. Plastic trash on shoreline. Photo: Bo Eide, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Source: Flickr
- pic. 4 – CLIMAVORE by Cooking Sections. Photo: Ars Electronica, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Source: Flickr
- pic. 5 – Salmon farming, Norway. Image by Gerd Meissner via Pixabay. Source: Pixabay
- video – Microplastic Pollution, Hristo Yordanov, 2020. Source: YouTube