Toxic Immortality

Abstract Much of contemporary environmental thought operates within paradigms of conservation, sustainability, and resilience—frameworks that assume the goal of ecological politics must be to prevent loss, preserve stability, and mitigate decline. However, these frameworks inadequately address cases where persistence and abundance, rather than disappearance, are the source of harm. An ecological ethic oriented toward decline, unbecoming, and decomposition reveals an alternative set of political and material stakes: not the conservation of things but their proper dissolution. The materialist philosophy of Lucretius provides grounds for a critique of the prevailing assumption that endurance is inherently beneficial, highlighting how materials like plastics embody a toxic form of immortality, persisting beyond biological time frames. In rethinking the conditions under which stability and preservation are desirable, Lucretianism advocates a shift in ecological thought that acknowledges the generative potential of decomposition and the dangers of unchecked persistence. By destabilizing assumed binaries (harmful/beneficial, ruinous/productive, loss/presence), this conception of declination prompts the reevaluation of contemporary ecological crises, particularly those involving waste materials, like plastic, that refuse to decompose.