$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
216 pages with 134 photographs by the author (118 color and 16 black-and-white), 8 maps and diagrams (6 color and 2 black-and-white), and 2 historic photographs (1 color and 1 black-and-white) = 144 illustrations
9.0 ” x 11.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN 978–1–960521–09–5
Published in October 2025
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized. Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
Nov. 13, 2025
Book signing and talk
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
(read review here)
by Michael Kolster
with an introduction by Russ Rymer
See how plastics that wash ashore Hawaiʻi’s beaches are being transformed into modern-day fossils.
Hawaiʻi’s “Big Island” is a place created by fire, being formed entirely from volcanic activity. Currently, it is home to four active volcanoes. The Big Island is also, due to its position relative to the North Pacific trash gyre, home to large amounts of plastic debris that ocean currents deposit on its shores, particularly on its remote southeastern areas such as Kamilo Beach. Much effort has been made to remove this debris, with a fair amount of success, but the flow of trash onto the beaches continues unabated, and keeping these beaches clean a never-ending task. Does clearing the beaches of plastic waste, only to bury it elsewhere, actually help? As plastic washes up on an island so recently formed from volcanic activity, we are reminded that everything there, including all forms and traces of life, must have come from somewhere else.
Photographer Michael Kolster became interested in the issue of plastic debris on Kamilo Beach through a paper from the Geological Society of America whose authors claimed that the plastic debris, when melted or otherwise combined with rocks on the beach, would probably enter the fossil record to become a horizon marker for the Anthropocene. Dubbed “plastiglomerates” by geologists, these hybrid “stones” are the product of humans burning plastic, whether intentionally or accidentally, that then melts and become fused with the naturally-occurring rocks that were created by volcanoes. These fusions of human and geological activity form a fossil-like record of present-day human activity that is likely to persist for thousands of millennia due to their prevalence, location, and composition.
Wanting to see these plastiglomerates for himself, Kolster traveled to Hawai’i, where he photographed Kamilo Beach and its plastiglomerates. He also collected examples of plastiglomerates that he took back to his studio in Maine. Kolster’s photographs of the plastiglomerates, both in Hawai’i and collected at home, show both the harsh reality and surprising beauty of plastic trash from the beaches of a Pacific paradise. While this trash can be viewed as both an eyesore and an insult to our ideas of what a tropical paradise like Hawai’i should be, Kolster also shows how seeing plastic on the beach is equivalent to looking in the mirror: We need to look closer at our reflection before impulsively wiping it clean, only to have to do it over and over day after day, week after week, endlessly.
About
About the Author
Michael Kolster is currently professor of art at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 2000. In 2013, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S and Europe, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books, all published with George F. Thompson Publishing, are Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (2016), L.A. River (2019), and Paris Park Photographs (2022).
About the Essayist
Russ Rymer has taught creative nonfiction at Harvard University, MIT, Bowdoin College, and Smith College, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among numerous other publications, and he is the author of Paris Twilight: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2013), American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (HarperCollins, 1998) and Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (HarperCollins, 1993), which won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was translated into six languages and transformed into a NOVA television series.
Slide Show
Mongrels of Our Making explores in words and photographs the recent discovery of a novel geological formation, the plastiglomerate, on Kamilo Point, a remote beach on the “Big Island” of Hawai’i. These haphazard fusions of plastic marine debris and coastal lava are forged when plastic littering the beach is used as fuel or inadvertently burned at the edge of campfires. Left behind are partially melted chunks of plastic permanently fused with the preexisting volcanic rocks and sand.
Geologists predict that these plastiglomerates will enter the fossil record and serve as horizon markers for the Anthropocene. Possibly just as important, these “mongrels,” an inseparable, random blend of natural and man-made influences, challenge our dependence on categories like “natural” or “artificial” to help us see and make sense of our place in the world. Russ Rymer’s introduction, “Exploring Plastic Inevitable,” sets the stage for this multi-layered journey into geology and culture, which comes with a lesson on viewing stereo photos in 3-D with crossed eyes.
Praise
“Without dismissing the environmental impact of plastic, Michael Kolster reveals through his evocative photographs a radical mode of perceiving synthetic substances, and by extension all supposedly artificial human objects, as organic parts of nature. His understated, granular images of ‘plastiglomerates’ (fused masses of plastic debris and lava rock found on a nearly inaccessible beach in Hawaiʻi), some photographed in situ and others individually against white backgrounds, possess an unearthly beauty that both evokes and transcends the vast scale of geological time. Kolster’s absorbing commentary adds another layer to a somehow profoundly unsettling book.”
—Jeffrey L. Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History
“Mike Kolster, in Mongrels of Our Making, depicts, among other things, beguiling anthropic rocks (known as plastiglomerates) that are appearing on a remote Hawaiʻian beach. Thought to be produced by beachside campfires, these meldings of marine-borne plastic garbage and chunks of coastal lava will likely mark our presence on the planet long after our uniquely inventive and destructive species has disappeared. Thoroughly exploring the intersection of art, geology, and plastic, the latter made from hydrocarbons, this fascinating and necessary book, with an incisive introduction by Russ Rymer, reflects the quandary of our age: How do we have it all and yet persist?
—Laura McPhee, Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and author of River of No Return and Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park
“Essayist Russ Rymer states that ‘[Kolster’s] studio portraits of these castaway mongrels strike [him] as equal parts beautiful and unsettling.’ Indeed, the whole book has this dichotomous quality. Equal parts information and image, exploration and presentation, data and emotional evocation, Kolster offers an extensive and immersive dive down a plastics-waste rabbit hole we probably didn’t want to know existed. But only the person who leads a plastic-free existence can afford ignorance of these ‘mongrels of our making.’ Kolster’s new book is an essential and eloquent exploration of finding ways to see and think about these inadvertent but compelling fusions of plastic and lava.”
—Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, and author of Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
“The truth of ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’ (Walt Kelly’s Pogo poster, Earth Day 1970) is embedded in Hawaiʻian plastiglomerates, denizens of our world’s humanature. Such mongrels exist not as mixed-breed dogs but as defiant, accidental amalgams of plastic and lava, to imbue this landscape with wonder and awe, as Mongrels of Our Making cleverly reveals.”
—Peter Goin, Foundation Professor, University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Humanature and Nuclear Landscapes