Drowning In Incorporated Plastic

I FIGURE I was raised, to a large extent, in and around plastic. As I dimly remember it, or maybe I'mjust imaging that I can remember, being surrounded by a pile of plastic toys while in my crib, or on the floor, where I sat for hours, playing. Nothing engenders technological advancement like a good old fashioned war, by necessity. Plastic,one of the many inventions to emerge from the msot destructive donflict of all time was an instant success in the American post war market place. The period between 1945 and 1960, 1970, or maybe even 1980 was the most prosperous time in American history. The war time economy was rapidly retooled into a peace time consumer economy with a special emphasis on military procurement funded by tax payers producing a vast arsenal of weapons and a permanent huge establishment on a permanent war time level or readiness. Plastic has been front and center in my life, and still is, and has been and remains central to our way of living and our economy. Journalist Beth Gardiner authored a just published seminal work on ths history of plastic, titled "Plastic, Inc." It is already highly recommended, considered essential reading for a deep understanding of the history of and role plastic has played and plays in our modern economy and culture. Too bad it, plastic, isn't biodegradable. A huge amount of plastic is buried in the nation's trash dumps, huge areas where the biosystem has been stripped down to the dirt, with our garbage dumped into ever growing piles daily, decade after decade. Welcome to the "anthropocene", the geological epoch in which a single species of animal, the human species, took total control of the planet with its world wide habitations and ever advancing understanding of nauture and technology. Plasiic is one of the many modern inventions whichi have rasied teh standard of living all voer the world. Were it not for its immortailty it indisposability, plastic might be regarded as humankind's sconomic salvation. But, alas, the plastic is piling up, and worse, it is and already has been injected into the environment in so many forms that billions and trillions of tiny, microscopic plastic are everywhere in teh world, including inside our bodies and bloodstreams. If you give much thought to this at all, you can become alarmed. This amazing, seemingly catastrophic situation is now being made known much more sidely, and the American public and global community are becoming more aware of it, fortunately. People in New Mexico today have a high ra of cancer, doubtless because their grandparents were pepper sprayed by nuclear radiation during the two test explosions in 1944. My understanding is that every human alive today has a few atoms of radioactive material floating around inside them. Microscopic particles of jet fuel, yes, jet fuel, were found in teh breastmilk of a lactating mother. She lived nowhere near an airport. Hopefully, palns and preparations are being made to ameliorate if not totally resolve this unbelievable situation. There are, amazing, plants which, when grown in contaminated soil, help clean ths soil of pollutants. Hemp, for isntance, helps nourish and replenish the soil. Terrifying as the reality of climate change is, the micro pollution of the Earth's air, soil, and water,and of our own bodies, when you really think about it, is more terrifying still. You prefer not to think about it, but, alas,somebody has to, or we humans, if we don't change our ways, will kill our species and all others too. With or without human folly, the Earth's biosystem is an amazing, miraculous manifestation of nature. The time has come to not only clean up the Earth, but to plant colonies of the Earth's biospere throughout the solar system, and beyond. The universe created us, and therefore presumably wants us to exist.