“Mummy...Daddy, what are clouds made of?” Almost every parent has fielded the innocent, eager question, perhaps explaining about mist, fog, water vapour, raindrops.
Great article, Julian! I just ordered 4 stainless steel water bottles and have been using my Esalen SS bottle for 20yrs. They make great gifts and may open some minds, maybe? The oil and gas industry controls every aspect of life down here in the Ohio River Valley, where a riverside drive will pass one plant after another cracking petrochemicals for plastic components. We have lost our damn minds and denial is the new normal. Have a blessed plastic free day!
An interesting point. I would tend to argue that the process is a deliberate free choice. A group of drunk teenagers in a fast, powerful car may not intend to kill themsekves, but that is the inevitable result of their actions. And so it is with modern humans, who lack the brains to see what their actions are leading up to, but choose it nonetheless.
I know Substack is a terrible forum for engaging in real back-and-forth with peers, limiting any chance to react or expound upon points in fair ways.
Free will is a tough concept to haggle out or haggle over - there's not much to the side that sees humans as purely deliberate, rational creatures, but a fully deterministic viewpoint is fairly aggravating.
In the example you invoke, I see much more circumstance than intention. Drinking is a huge part of teenage culture, as is the corporate profit from easy automotive lethality, so matters emanate from perfectly understandable, common misperceptions into terrible tragedies. We all make mistakes in our lives, but some of these mistakes carry enormous significance, without being fully intentional.
Same with the human predicament. Many humans have incredibly well-functioning brains, but are locked into ultrasocial paths of highly destructive functioning. Do they "choose" to work for murderous corporations, or are they compelled to chase a buck like everybody else? Do each of us drive as suicidal gangsters, or do we drive because to live under a rock with an ant as a best friend seems pointlessly self-ennobling?
Humans have brains, it is true. But they seldom use them… mainly they are bent on pleasure and self gratification,even if it costs the lives of their children…
The only gatherings, assemblies, and communities of truly civilized humans are being hunted down to be disappeared by fascist oligarchs and warmongering corporatists who are pulling the strings of the Guardians of Pedophiles (GOP) and the pumpkin colored meat puppet they worship.
I still marvel how the 'land of the brave and home of the free' instantly became the cowed and subservient, unwilling to physically defend their national ideal. But it's not the first time in history we have observed the process... I suspect plastic and epidemic brain damage offer a parsimonious explanation.
I read your post about microplastics and was delighted to see that malady so openly and well exposed. I've been saying for at least a decade that this is a lurking existential threat to life on Earth, including us humans. I suppose I should be surprised that most of mainstream healthcare scoffs at the idea as pharma, insurer, provider corporatists and their policy puppets turn blind eyes, dear ears, closed minds, and cold hard hearts to this mortal threat -- but I'm not.
I'm not sure We the People were turned so "instantly" into Us the Sheeple you quite correctly describe. IMO, we were already across the event horizon of that slippery slope by time the we'd been hit with the spate of assassinations in the '60s, the Powell Memo in '72, and the "Mandate for Leadership" cooked up by the Heritage Foundation in the Reagan era, to name just a few of the wounds inflicted on our plummet down that rocky slope. In its 9th revision, that Mandate became the "Project 2025" that finally sealed the evil deal for the fascist oligarchy and warmongering corporatocracy with the re-election of the orange buffoon in '24.
Spot on, mate! In researching it, I got the distinct impression that the weight of medical opinion is now shifting rapidly towards a broad, as well as a detailed, understanding of the scale of the threat. But I still fear we are trying to view the chemical jigsaw one piece at a time!
My grievous conviction is that we're still reading the dice one pip at a time after they've already been rolled and our number is up and our fate cast into the whirlwinds of mass extinction.
Humanity is about to undergo an awakening, I'm afraid. She is addicted to so many aspects of life. Is it because our economic system is a human construct (story), linear by design and based on our biological metabolism: from raw material to waste? While Nature is (by definition) circular?
"Of course, you didn’t want to know that, so like about 8 billion other people, you look the other way, keep on using plastics, wearing microfibre and synthetic clothing, buying drinks in plastic bottles and plastic toys for your kids, storing food in plastic containers, driving cars and flying in planes made of plastic, furnishing your home and office in plastic. If someone told you it contained arsenic, you might pause – but nah. It’s just plastic. Must be safe, mustn’t it? Those big chemical corporates would never sell it if it wasn’t safe, would they?"
I'm curious how YOU try and live your life to avoid all this plastic. Not being condescending, I'm genuinely curious.
First, I feel a responsibility to my grandchildren, not to leave them a toxic cinder of a planet and brain damage. I avoid plastic where possible when making purchases. Choose natural fibres, home grown food, no takeaways, no bottled water, no plastic toys for kids, paper shopping bags, recycle the unavoidable plastic waste. Eg https://earth.org/ways-to-reduce-your-plastic-waste/. Lots of advice on the Internet for those who care.
Plastics is 100% correlated to economic growth. We are rich because plastics is cheep. . Damn if you continue and damn if you continue. Plastics was considered a great leap in progress and prosperity in the 50s.
In considering all the toxic substances, we are inundated with and in some way cannot escape, I believe that the primary cause of it is that societies are to a large extent made up of people who are unaware of their thought patterns that drive them to grasp after power, profit, wealth, control - no matter the cost.
Perhaps the best we can do individually, and perhaps forming groups to be more aware, is to cleanse our thoughts and unconscious from all negative energies as much as possible. Could it be that cultivating higher awareness, transcendent energies of good could in some way, protect us from the harm all these pollutants can wreak upon us? And of course, even though we are inundated with all these toxins to make the best choices as possible for our health.
I appreciate this article and the very real, pernicious threat detailed here. But this math is not mathing: “14 million people die each year from chemicals in the human living environment – 24 per cent of the human population.” A quarter of the human population is closer to 2 billion.
Since in most cases Plastic has shown itself to have multiple benefits in the short run with respect to durability flexibility cost ease of manufacture and so on and also is used in many critical product categories that are currently essential for human health such as medical devices enormous pressure should be put on governments to support R&D and generous subsidies for inventors and companies all over the world to design and produce effective alternatives to plastics.
We can demand the end to the use of fossil fuels all we want and we certainly should but just as wind and solar and batteries are essential technologies to enable Fassel fuels to no longer be combusted for energy so too we need their equivalents so that we no longer need to rely upon fossil fuel based plastics,
I would hope that the many citizen groups and others aware of the Plastic holocaust coming our way will work to constructively and urgently support the development of alternatives to plastics
Great article, Julian! I just ordered 4 stainless steel water bottles and have been using my Esalen SS bottle for 20yrs. They make great gifts and may open some minds, maybe? The oil and gas industry controls every aspect of life down here in the Ohio River Valley, where a riverside drive will pass one plant after another cracking petrochemicals for plastic components. We have lost our damn minds and denial is the new normal. Have a blessed plastic free day!
This is exactly true, and so well written.
Does civilisation "intend" to commit suicide, or is it locked into no other possibility?
An interesting point. I would tend to argue that the process is a deliberate free choice. A group of drunk teenagers in a fast, powerful car may not intend to kill themsekves, but that is the inevitable result of their actions. And so it is with modern humans, who lack the brains to see what their actions are leading up to, but choose it nonetheless.
I know Substack is a terrible forum for engaging in real back-and-forth with peers, limiting any chance to react or expound upon points in fair ways.
Free will is a tough concept to haggle out or haggle over - there's not much to the side that sees humans as purely deliberate, rational creatures, but a fully deterministic viewpoint is fairly aggravating.
In the example you invoke, I see much more circumstance than intention. Drinking is a huge part of teenage culture, as is the corporate profit from easy automotive lethality, so matters emanate from perfectly understandable, common misperceptions into terrible tragedies. We all make mistakes in our lives, but some of these mistakes carry enormous significance, without being fully intentional.
Same with the human predicament. Many humans have incredibly well-functioning brains, but are locked into ultrasocial paths of highly destructive functioning. Do they "choose" to work for murderous corporations, or are they compelled to chase a buck like everybody else? Do each of us drive as suicidal gangsters, or do we drive because to live under a rock with an ant as a best friend seems pointlessly self-ennobling?
Humans have brains, it is true. But they seldom use them… mainly they are bent on pleasure and self gratification,even if it costs the lives of their children…
WHAT 'civilization'?
The only gatherings, assemblies, and communities of truly civilized humans are being hunted down to be disappeared by fascist oligarchs and warmongering corporatists who are pulling the strings of the Guardians of Pedophiles (GOP) and the pumpkin colored meat puppet they worship.
It isn't 'suicide.' It's murder.
I still marvel how the 'land of the brave and home of the free' instantly became the cowed and subservient, unwilling to physically defend their national ideal. But it's not the first time in history we have observed the process... I suspect plastic and epidemic brain damage offer a parsimonious explanation.
I read your post about microplastics and was delighted to see that malady so openly and well exposed. I've been saying for at least a decade that this is a lurking existential threat to life on Earth, including us humans. I suppose I should be surprised that most of mainstream healthcare scoffs at the idea as pharma, insurer, provider corporatists and their policy puppets turn blind eyes, dear ears, closed minds, and cold hard hearts to this mortal threat -- but I'm not.
I'm not sure We the People were turned so "instantly" into Us the Sheeple you quite correctly describe. IMO, we were already across the event horizon of that slippery slope by time the we'd been hit with the spate of assassinations in the '60s, the Powell Memo in '72, and the "Mandate for Leadership" cooked up by the Heritage Foundation in the Reagan era, to name just a few of the wounds inflicted on our plummet down that rocky slope. In its 9th revision, that Mandate became the "Project 2025" that finally sealed the evil deal for the fascist oligarchy and warmongering corporatocracy with the re-election of the orange buffoon in '24.
Spot on, mate! In researching it, I got the distinct impression that the weight of medical opinion is now shifting rapidly towards a broad, as well as a detailed, understanding of the scale of the threat. But I still fear we are trying to view the chemical jigsaw one piece at a time!
My grievous conviction is that we're still reading the dice one pip at a time after they've already been rolled and our number is up and our fate cast into the whirlwinds of mass extinction.
Humanity is about to undergo an awakening, I'm afraid. She is addicted to so many aspects of life. Is it because our economic system is a human construct (story), linear by design and based on our biological metabolism: from raw material to waste? While Nature is (by definition) circular?
See my essay https://vawegener.substack.com/p/the-economic-addiction-of-humanity
"Of course, you didn’t want to know that, so like about 8 billion other people, you look the other way, keep on using plastics, wearing microfibre and synthetic clothing, buying drinks in plastic bottles and plastic toys for your kids, storing food in plastic containers, driving cars and flying in planes made of plastic, furnishing your home and office in plastic. If someone told you it contained arsenic, you might pause – but nah. It’s just plastic. Must be safe, mustn’t it? Those big chemical corporates would never sell it if it wasn’t safe, would they?"
I'm curious how YOU try and live your life to avoid all this plastic. Not being condescending, I'm genuinely curious.
First, I feel a responsibility to my grandchildren, not to leave them a toxic cinder of a planet and brain damage. I avoid plastic where possible when making purchases. Choose natural fibres, home grown food, no takeaways, no bottled water, no plastic toys for kids, paper shopping bags, recycle the unavoidable plastic waste. Eg https://earth.org/ways-to-reduce-your-plastic-waste/. Lots of advice on the Internet for those who care.
And even more here: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/earth-and-environmental-science/environmental-science/how-fix-broken-planet-advice-surviving-21st-century?format=PB
Plastics is a pollutant, but…
Plastics is 100% correlated to economic growth. We are rich because plastics is cheep. . Damn if you continue and damn if you continue. Plastics was considered a great leap in progress and prosperity in the 50s.
In considering all the toxic substances, we are inundated with and in some way cannot escape, I believe that the primary cause of it is that societies are to a large extent made up of people who are unaware of their thought patterns that drive them to grasp after power, profit, wealth, control - no matter the cost.
Perhaps the best we can do individually, and perhaps forming groups to be more aware, is to cleanse our thoughts and unconscious from all negative energies as much as possible. Could it be that cultivating higher awareness, transcendent energies of good could in some way, protect us from the harm all these pollutants can wreak upon us? And of course, even though we are inundated with all these toxins to make the best choices as possible for our health.
Oxymoron: plastic water filters!?
I appreciate this article and the very real, pernicious threat detailed here. But this math is not mathing: “14 million people die each year from chemicals in the human living environment – 24 per cent of the human population.” A quarter of the human population is closer to 2 billion.
24% of all human deaths. See link.
Since in most cases Plastic has shown itself to have multiple benefits in the short run with respect to durability flexibility cost ease of manufacture and so on and also is used in many critical product categories that are currently essential for human health such as medical devices enormous pressure should be put on governments to support R&D and generous subsidies for inventors and companies all over the world to design and produce effective alternatives to plastics.
We can demand the end to the use of fossil fuels all we want and we certainly should but just as wind and solar and batteries are essential technologies to enable Fassel fuels to no longer be combusted for energy so too we need their equivalents so that we no longer need to rely upon fossil fuel based plastics,
I would hope that the many citizen groups and others aware of the Plastic holocaust coming our way will work to constructively and urgently support the development of alternatives to plastics
There are plenty of alternatives. There are green plastics. But you need to get the petrochemical sector to cooperate.
There is very litle modern healthcare without plastics. Healthcare without plastics would be like in the 40-50s.
Do not forget that it is very difficult to make vaccines without plastics.