“Yellow Towels #2, 1979” and “Amy, Phil, and Brian, 1980,” photographs by Tina Barney, from her book Tina Barney: The Beginning, which was published last year by Radius Books © The artist. Courtesy Radius Books

Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas; in half the arterial plaques of Campanian carotid endarterectomy patients; in the gastrointestinal tracts of three bottlenose dolphins and a harbor porpoise in the Black Sea; in shrimp in South Africa’s Crocodile River; in two-thousand-year-old archaeological remains buried seven meters underground; and in the gonads of adult oysters…