Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care

Winner of three book awards:
* Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication
* James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric/Public Address
* Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association for most outstanding scholarly book of the year

Cover of book, *Beyond Straw Men*, featuring a photograph by Kenyan photojournalist and advocate James Wakibia, “Two boys looking at a polluted river.”
Half the proceeds of the book will go to Eco-Rethink, which Wakibia co-founded; the other half to Justice for Formosa Victims, founded by Nancy Bui.

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or strawman fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics, mobilized around plastics, reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change today. Attuned to on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Pezzullo engages advocacy campaigns, public controversies, and policies, including interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the US, and Vietnam on her podcast,
Communicating Care.  
She argues plastics became an articulator of crisis, or an entry point into contested contemporary environmental politics including carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments—and detachments—Pezzullo illustrates how unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex can be resisted through imperfect but
impactful networked cultures of care.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Care Amid an Ocean of Trouble
Chapter 1: #ThereIsNoAway:
Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and The Life/Death Cycle of Plastics
Chapter 2: Have a Coke and a #FootprintCalculator:
The Myth of Recycling and Transnational Greenwashing
Chapter 3: From #BanPlasticsKE to #ISupportBanPlasticsKE:
Pissed Off Online, Picturing Participation, and Policing Pollution
Chapter 4: Engaging #StrawlessinSeattle and #StopSucking:
The Loneliest Whale, Sporting Fun, and American Exceptionalism
Chapter 5: #SuckItAbleism Intervenes:
Eco-Normative Shaming, Voicing Justice, and Planetary Fatalism
Chapter 6: Creating #toichonca (#IChooseFish):
Trauma, Affective Art, and Big Tech Dominance
Conclusion: #BreakFree(FromPlastics)
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Resources: Listen to the Podcast: Communicating Care
Additional resources for anti-plastic pollution advocacy, including petitions & pledges
More Podcasts on plastics, ecologies, climate justice, disability justice, & care
Videos & links about what Pezzullo calls “the plastics-industrial complex”

Author/Book Featured in (sample):
“A New Report Details the Climate, Health and Human Rights Impacts of a Plastic Bottle.” June 7, 2023. Quoted by Jodi Helmer. Salon.com. https://www.salon.com/2023/06/12/a-new-report-details-the-climate-health-and-human-rights-impacts-of-a-plastic-bottle_partner/
The Guardian. April 10, 2023. Quoted by Maddie Stone. “Exxon’s new ‘advanced recycling’ plant raises environmental concerns.”
Lisa Marshall. October 25, 2022. “Rethinking Plastic.” CMCI Now Magazine.
Julie Poppen. October 5, 2022. 3 things to understand about climate justice. CU Today.

Beyond Straw Men is available for purchase at UC Press (with a 30% discount code if you use the “create a flier” link), Bookshop, Powell’s, Amazon.com, or Barnes & Noble. It is part of the University of California Press Book Series: Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture

ENDORSEMENTS & REVIEWS

“Pezzullo has produced a revelatory and revolutionary meditation on one of the most significant power struggles of our time. Beyond Straw Men features a caring and deep appreciation for the complexities, flaws, and the beauty of the ‘impure politics’ surrounding plastic pollution, while centering the perspectives and experiences of Global South communities, environmental justice and disability justice advocates, and our more-than-human relatives. Her sources of evidence are solid, her arguments are persuasive, and her writing is at once engaging, serious, humorous, and uplifting. A delightful book to sit with and be inspired by
in these challenging times! 
-David N. Pellow,
author of What is Critical Environmental Justice?

“Beyond Straw Men compares the very different but interlocking national and international tensions that arise during hashtag activism and counteractivism around plastic pollution in Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam.
It provides a multisited geographic approach to describing a global 
(yet local!) problem in a heterogeneous political world.”
— Max Liboiron,
author of Pollution is Colonialism