*Contains spoilers for the manga version of ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.’

A scientist’s dream

A young scientist tends to specimens that look like stalked pom poms and deep-sea sponges. The “plants” that she works with are not actually plants, but large fungi from a rapidly spreading forest known as the “Sea of Corruption.” In their natural habitat of the toxic jungle, the fungi release spores harmful to human and most more-than-human life. But, strangely enough, here in the scientist’s garden laboratory, the air is safe.

The scientist works meticulously and in secret, hidden within the deepest cellars of her home. Then, one day, she reaches a startling conclusion: the fungi of the poisonous forest are cleansing the polluted earth. When she is called to fight for the empire that asserts control over her small, autonomous kingdom in times of war, the young woman, no longer able to care for the fungi, turns off her laboratory equipment. The fungi die. 

This is my favourite scene from ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,’ first released in 1984. It’s a great scrap of worldbuilding, giving us a glint of calm in an otherwise frenzied, post-apocalyptic world. Here, in the war-torn world of ‘Nausicaä,’ the titular hero struggles to reconcile her love for life with her despair over the increasingly violent actions of humans. Nausicaä fears for the peoples caught between two warring empires, and for the creatures of the forest, who are treated by humans with disgust.

Unlike most, Nausicaä doesn’t automatically label these creatures as “impure” or evil. Her empathy extends to all living beings no matter how grotesque they might seem. This includes flesh-eating worms, a giant slime mould grown as a weapon of mass destruction, and even one of the organic robots that — prior to its hibernation — was used in the ancient war that led to the first seeding of the Sea of Corruption. Instead of revulsion, Nausicaä recognises that they — humans and beyond-humans alike — are each individual parts of a broader, collective whole, each with a will of their own to survive.

Though not perfect, ‘Nausicaä’ is a story about revering life no matter who or what this life might look like, and about how, for Miyazaki at least, the real poison is systemic greed. Today, 40 years on from the film’s release and almost 30 years after the manga was completed, what can ‘Nausicaä’ teach us about living with multispecies others on a polluted planet?

But before we dig further into Nausicaä’s story and the Sea of Corruption, let’s return briefly to the waters of our real world. More specifically, let’s head over to the North Pacific Ocean. 

Trash fish

It's a well-known fact that plastics are everywhere: in the air we breathe, in the soils we tend, in the deepest point of the ocean, and even in human placentas. Each day, in the waters between the coasts of North America, Hawai'i, and Japan, rotating ocean currents sweep in and accumulate countless marine debris particles. The Pacific Trash Vortex, otherwise known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is thought to be over six times as large as the UK—though it’s not exactly a trash island. The plastics here are tiny, supposedly coming mostly from the fishing industry, and all together looking like, as the NOAA puts it: “pepper flakes swirling in a soup.” 

Microplastics have a plethora of detrimental effects on marine animals and seabirds. Among other things, ingestion of microplastics can cause the blocking of digestive tracts, the diminishment of capacities for reproduction, and genetic damage. What’s more, these same ocean-bound plastics eventually find their way back into human stomachs through global fishery chains. Though research is still on the fence about what exactly microplastics mean for human health, the prospects are far from benign. It’s surprising then, that in recent years, the toxic waters of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have been likened to an “oasis in the sea.”

It started back in 2019, when marine biologist Rebecca R. Helm and her team found the Pacific gyre to be teeming with life. Here, it turned out that plastics were actually being used as rafts for tiny, neustonic life forms to breed and live on. Recorded in their findings, to name just a few, were prawn-like amphipods, by-the-wind-sailors, and pale, violet snails who drifted upside down on mucus bubbles. Frilled blue buttons (a type of colonial jelly organism) also made appearances, as did the blue button’s predators, the spiky blue sea dragons. Incredibly, the amount of plastic Helm and co. found in the waters directly correlated to the amount of life: “the more plastic, the more life.”

Other scientists are less celebratory. That’s because a substantial amount of these trash-dwelling organisms are coastal bryozoans, sponges, barnacles and so on. Pulled in by oceanic currents and events like the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, these coastal species — previously unable to live in the high seas — are now reproducing and persisting in strange new waters all thanks to plastics. Their survival has led to a new kind of floating ecosystem composed of both coastal and pelagic species: a so-called “neopelagic community,” which some believe to harbour the beginnings of future “species invasions” and the eradication of oceanic “native species.”

There’s often a moral judgement when we think about “non-native species.” I think of my mum telling off the “bad” “weeds” “stealing” soil from her geraniums. But can a jellyfish or a knotweed really have ill intentions? After all, “invasive species” are made invasive primarily through human activities and movements. “Non-native” creatures are often stowaways on ships, escapees from plant nurseries or human homes, or imported food sources from colonial bases, but they’re not really villains. So we might see the coastal creatures in the Pacific Trash Vortex as “mean” organisms outcompeting the pelagic ones, or we might see that they’re just out there on the ocean doing their thing, procreating on humanmade plastics.

In many ways, the creatures of the Pacific Trash Vortex are a lot like the insects of the Sea of Corruption. They survive where human life can’t and they tend to be seen as either unimportant or straight up malicious. It’s easy to minimise the value of animal lives, especially when they have no economic use to humans, when they’re seen as “invasive” “pests” and “aliens,” when they’re not mammals or birds, and when they’re swirling around in the middle of the biggest, deepest ocean on Earth. But ‘Nausicaä’ teaches us that life in itself is valuable, regardless of whether you have two eyes, sixteen eyes, or none at all.

In ‘Nausicaä,’ no individual being is pure evil. The giant Ohmu, who spread the Sea of Corruption via their bodies as they migrate, are deeply compassionate. The God Warrior, the ancient robot created to kill and destroy, turns out to be a pitiful creature who, like a child, doesn’t fully understand the consequences of their actions. Even one of the hateful, warring emperors is more than he first seems. Near the end of the manga, right before he dies, he transforms into a scared, gentle old man. Evil isn’t a personality trait or a creature’s “nature,” but the result of violent human systems and legacies that see land, life, and people as nothing more than resources to profit from. This brings us to the last part of this post: corporate greed and toxic colonialism.

Ending disposability

While Nausicaä sees all life as inherently valuable, the warring emperors of her world see all life as inherently disposable. They think nothing of using people, animals, fungi, and so on as fodder in their quests for more power, land, and labour. Miyazaki was partly inspired by the Minamata Bay disaster, where petrochemicals and plastics manufacturer Chisso dumped wastewater into Minamata Bay between 1932 and 1968, leading to the severe mercury poisoning of hundreds to thousands of people. Chisso ignored its victims for decades, suppressed evidence that proved their misconduct, and even increased the amount of contaminants in their wastewater. (It’s alleged that they only stopped because their chemical production methods became outdated.) We might then look at ‘Nausicaä’ as a tale about the environmental degradation brought on by corporate greed, but I also read it as a tale about toxic colonialism.

I owe a lot of my understanding of toxic colonialism to Max Liboiron. In their book, ‘Pollution is Colonialism,’ Liboiron writes that pollution is not the result of capitalism, but of violent colonial land dynamics that assume access to Indigenous land. One clear example of this, and the one that Liboiron focuses on, is plastics. In their article for Teen Vogue, ‘Plastic is a Function of Colonialism,’ Liboiron explains that plastic production is not an innocent process, but a long line of colonial acts:

We see this clearly in the global plastic waste trade, which depends on countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ghana, and more to process their disproportionate share of waste. At the same time, media and NGOs from the so-called “Global North” will often chastise these places for land “mismanagement,” as seen in the report from Ocean Conservancy that recommended certain Asian nations incinerate “their waste” with the help of foreign-funded companies. The report was retracted after it was acknowledged that much of the waste within these places came from Western nations.

Liboiron points out how mainstream plastics discourse puts the onus onto the individual — think recycle, reuse, etc. — when it should really be an issue for mega-corporations like Coca-Cola who provide no alternatives to single-use plastics. This often creates inescapable plastic pollution for places like the Pacific Islands, a region already disproportionately affected by plastic pollution, with a long history of protesting against US and Japanese dumping of nuclear waste into the South Pacific.

So when we look at “non-native species” in the Pacific Trash Vortex, rather than thinking solely about how these species outcompete pelagic organisms and despairing about a generalised human nature, we might expand our questions to think about how exactly the plastics got there in the first place. Doing this, we can see that these new multispecies webs of life and death are strung on colonial legacies that ripple through our present day via processes of pollution.

Environmental racism is another manifestation of toxic colonialism’s processes of pollution. Examples of this closer to home for me in the UK include how, in 2022, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced that areas of London with higher populations of people of colour are over 50% more likely to face climate risks than predominantly white areas. Further afield, in the predominantly Black neighbourhoods of Gloster and Bastrop, Mississippi, the UK-funded corporation Drax came under fire for furthering environmental racism when its wood pellet plants were found to be emitting well over the legal amount of carcinogenic VOCs into the atmosphere.

Stories against trash

In all of the above examples, corporate greed is just one side of environmental pollution. The other is the omnipresent legacy of toxic colonialism that sees colonised and formerly colonised peoples as less valuable, as more expendable. Like Helm, the scientist looking at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ecosystem who we came across earlier, Liboiron thinks that we need an approach to plastic that cuts it right at the source, long before it has a chance to get into the oceans. This means dismantling the colonial structures and assumptions that enable plastic production in the first place. It means challenging ideas around what — and who — is disposable.

This is the heart of Nausicaä’s story and the main lesson that I take from it. Though art alone won’t change anything, it can help to challenge, transform, and process ideas and emotions. Reading ‘Nausicaä’ as a story about toxic colonialism recognises pollution, species extinctions, global warming, etc. not as the unknown effects of modernisation, but as the known results of conquest and violence. Environmental apocalypses become inseparable from colonial violence. What’s more, far from being some distant climate event somewhere in the future — environmental apocalypses can be recognised as present, ongoing catastrophes that have existed for tens to hundreds of years in places like Palestine, the Americas, West Africa, West Papua, Sudan, Yemen, and many, many more.

‘Nausicaä’ reminds me that, for true environmental freedom, accountability must be shifted from the individual to the political figures and multi-national corporations that perpetuate colonial relations. In this, reading ‘Nausicaä’ is a reminder that all our struggles are connected. Not only in human terms, but across species boundaries. While the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is wreaking havoc on many multispecies worlds, it isn’t the fault of the coastal bryozoans or even of the microplastics, but the fault of legacies, processes, and relations of toxic colonialism. It’s these same legacies, processes, and relations that harm people in Ghana, the Philippines, Turtle Island, and more.

One last lesson from ‘Nausicaä’ is how to locate hope within hopelessness. The forest people of ‘Nausicaä’ and Nausicaä herself remind those of us in places and/or from cultures separated from “nature” that other multispecies relations have always been possible. And in the final chapter, when Nausicaä learns the truth at the Crypt — that the poisonous Sea of Corruption was created by ancient human scientists to cleanse the earth — Nausicaä rejects the 1,000 year old plan to make the people of her time disposable. Instead, she destroys the Crypt and its plans to replace her people with cryogenically frozen embryos modified to breathe pure air. She knows that the Sea of Corruption will eventually wipe out the human species but, by resisting the forces that seek to devalue her life and those lives around her, she is free. When all is done, Nausicaä emerges with one last rallying cry: “We must live.”

Ultimately, ‘Nausicaä’ teaches us that no-one is disposable. As catastrophes deepen, and as apocalypses continue, it asks that we continue to reject all that tries to make people, land, and life into trash. For in and at the end, nothing is waste; everything is meaningful.