Making the Best of A Bad Situation, PART I

ON THE NEWS I heard that an international conference is being convened to address the issue of plastic pollution, and to agree upon a treaty to eliminate it. Within my occasionally fertile mind arose a question: precisely how in the world can anybody reasonably expect to "eliminate" plastic pollution by "treaty"? If ever there was a case of "the devil is in the details", surely, this is it. The report further indicated that more plastic has been produced and introduced into the economy and the environment in the past ten years than in all the twentieth century, which would include only the years since World WAr Two, the period during which plastic was invented. This fact unto itself reveals the sheer enormity of the problem. Most forms of plastic require a very long time to degrade into its constituent parts, but, eventually plastic objects break down into micro plastics,tiny particles of the complex carbon molecules of which the stuff is made. Micro plastic particles end up everywhere; in the atmosphere, in the soil, in our bodies...everywhere. This has been measured and verified, repeatedly.Precisely what,then, will be our plan for cleansing the environment of all this carcinogenic mess,in all its widely dispersed glory? Apparently sunflowers, aside from being beautiful, are quite effective in sucking heavy, complex elements, including the heaviest atoms of all, the sort of which atom bombs are made, out of the soil, and metabolizizne them. The exact process by which they accomplish this seeming miracle is beyond my comprehension; is it possible that an atom of uraniaum can be absorbed into a sunflower plant, and broken down into hydrogen atoms and water molecules, for the nourishment of the plant? It sounds impossible,but if it isn't, let's cover the Earth's land mass with sunflower fields forever, wait a few years, and come back to a pristine agricultural system, in which not a trace of radioactivity shows up in our evening meal. Who knows? Maybe the micro plastic particles will have been absorbed and utilized for the health and growth of the magnificent sunflower plant! Then, what to do about the oceans, the atmosphere, and the insides of our beautiful, sexy bodies? The task before us, in a nutshell, seems daunting, impossibly so. It is tempting to resign ourselves to the unsavory reality that, no matter what we do, we are doomed to live out our lives in a world heavily polluted by micro plastic particles. Running trillions of gallons of seawater through filters, cleansing our bodies by ingesting sunflower seeds or plants, filtering the entirety of Earth's atmosphere - seems beyond daunting, indeed, impossible. And yet, we will, if all goes well, soon have a "treaty". A more reasonable assumption is that we are stuck with plastic pollution, on account of its insidious, ubiquitous nature. I recall a young lady who decided to have her breast milk analyzed by a chemistry lab, as she was preparing to give birth, and wanted to ensure the quality of her milk for her soon arriving child. What came back from the lab was a report which included a veritable slew of chemicals in her breast milk, a mixture more befitting a toxic waste site than a woman's milk. It included jet fuel, a few molecules thereof. She lived nowhere near an airport nor jets of any sort,and could not imagine where it came from. Perhaps imaagination isn't needed. Low level reasoning might do the trick. For a long time, especially in recent times, humanity has been making things, moving everything around, throwing things away, putting stuff everywhere. There are more than thirteen hundred officially designated hazardous waste sites in the United States alone. Most Americans live rather close to at least one. Our best bet might be to accept this reality; that we have waited too long, have sinned against nature too much,and are, to an extent, left to live in our own filth. Despite our best efforts, we will never resore this planet to its previous pristine pre- industrial human state. Our only recourse might well be to simply find a way to be happy on our very dirty planet.