Listen now (37 min) | Chrysalis Poets | When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us? Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down. Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry. Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have? Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator. For more, see the episode page at ChrysalisPodcast.org.