Considering the Source

OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE Pacific Ocean floats a huge pile of trash, mostly plastic. In oceans around the world there are several such floating garbage piles, acres across, where the currents congregate. The total amount of garbage in the oceans is now greater in weight than the total amount of fish. Not to worry, however. A teenager in the Netherlands has a solution which you're likely to hear more about soon. It consists of a sort of floating rope which herds the garbage into one small area, and permits its scooping up. This situation, one would think, would be sufficient to alert humanity to the utter bizzareness of its condition. According to some (American conservative climate change deniers) the human species is so puny that it could not possibly impact Earth's environment in any meaningful way, even if it tried. It might depend on how hard we try. One can imagine dumping all garbage into the oceans, setting off all the world's nuclear bombs simultaneously, and opening the spigot on all the world's oil wells, and letting them gush at will. That, one might imagine, would do the trick. When Lake Eerie caught fire in 1970, and when downtown Los Angeles was obscured by smog in the middle of a sunny day in the nineteen seventies, humanity's "puniness" seems to have been belied. the sight of millions of Chinese wearing gas masks in Chinese cities arouses one's suspicions. The people who deny humankind's ability to destroy Earth's ecosystem are the same people who insist that a single volcanic eruption spews more filth into the atmosphere than all human industrial activity combined, that evolution by natural selection is a rumor, that climate change is a liberal hoax, that a great big god up in the sky is responsible for all life on earth,and that a book which claims the world is flat is the inerrant word of that god. As always, one must consider the source.