As we all sit here during the Covid-19 crisis pondering our mortality, my thoughts have turned to an age-old question: how much should humans do to try to save ourselves from the inevitable pains of life? This is not an easy question, especially these days. That’s because though we have all been raised to think of the glories of human progress and how much they have improved our lives, both daily and long-term, we are now finding out that some, if not most of the “advances” we humans have made, especially since the industrial revolution three or four centuries ago, have not turned out as rosy as we once thought. Nonetheless, there are still computer mavens and AI specialists who are gleefully predicting the massive improvements to come from robots and cyborg humans who will soon be able (they say) to directly upload to our brains all the human knowledge thus far accumulated, and more besides. In short, the optimism about ‘progress’ is proceeding rapidly to the next glorious phase. So there’s this disconnect and always has been, as far as I can tell, between what we humans can do, and what we should do; between what we can know, and what we should know; whether, as the Greeks saw, the stealing of fire from the gods by Prometheus, was a good thing or a bad thing. In the myth, Prometheus was made to suffer for eternity for trying to give humans the power that should only be possessed by the gods. The Genesis story gets to this same dilemma: Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge which Yahweh specifically told them not to do, because it was presumably reserved for God alone. But Adam and Eve, prompted by Satan, did taste that forbidden fruit and, as a result so the story goes, we all suffered endless pain and difficulty in life from then on. In short, it’s not at all clear that humans are wise or foolish to try to improve their lot through knowledge, or learning, or invention.
Lest we think this is all the stuff of ‘out-of-date’ myth, this problem has become all too clear in our time. Consider only the problem of global warming, or ACD as I prefer to call it: anthropogenic climate disruption. This threat to our very existence on this planet—and to the existence of most other life forms as well—stems directly from alleged human progress. We have invented a source of energy, fossil fuel, to power almost all human activity. Wood burning powered steam engines; then coal took its place as a power source; then gasoline became the power source for all of our engines, including those that powered our automobiles, our trains, our planes, and our electric plants. Aside from the destruction that wood, then coal, then petroleum did to forests and miners and oceans from oil spills and air from smoke pollution, there is now the destruction of our atmosphere from the so-called ‘greenhouse effect,’ which , as a result of CO2, traps heat in our atmosphere, making temperatures steadily rise planet wide. In other words, the price we are paying for motorized progress is the threatened death of our species on this planet. Worse than Prometheus and Adam and Eve combined. And all because humans dared to capture the energy of decaying plant matter and convert it to human convenience. We no longer have to walk; we can ride or motorboat or fly.
And that’s not the half of it. I’ve been really alarmed recently about the information that’s emerging about plastic—our modern convenience par excellence. It seems that most of the world we humans have constructed in the last century—from bottles to car parts to containers to bags to shoes to clothing to carpets to computers to phones to construction parts like insulation and waterproofing and paints (the list could go on indefinitely)—is constructed with plastic, itself a product of petroleum. The price for these endless conveniences in our daily lives showed up first (to me, at least) in the revelation of the monstrous garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. A swirling island of plastic bottles and caps and every variety of plastic detritus has all made its way into our oceans, never ever dies (plastic is forever), and is floating like some nightmare ship of human folly in the Pacific. And the worst part is that sunlight breaks it down into tiny balls of plastic that fish and birds mistake for food, consume, and of course cannot digest. And some of that detritus makes its way into our guts too, as we consume fish flesh that is laced with plastic.
Now we are also learning that this plastic breakdown makes the particles so tiny that they travel on the winds as well. A recent article in Science Magazine, “Plastic Dust is Blowing into U.S. National Parks, more than 100 tons each year,” points out the horrifying fact that this stuff is deeply embedded in not just water and soil but our air, and thereby in our lungs, our guts, our very cells. A biogeochemist named Janice Brahney has done studies and her results are stunning:
After running the numbers, Brahney and her colleagues estimated that about 132 pieces of microplastic land on every square meter of wilderness each day. That adds up to more than 1000 tons of plastic per year across national parks and other protected areas of the western United States—the equivalent of 300 million plastic water bottles, they report today in Science. …Much of this microplastic might have been circulating for years, if not decades, she says. The particles may have first settled in farm fields, or deserts, or the ocean and then have been picked up again by winds as part of a global “plastic cycle.” (Erik Stokstad, Science, June 11, 2020.)
Just let that sink in. A global plastic cycle. Tons of plastic each year landing everywhere in our most remote, and heretofore pristine, areas. Brahney sums it up thus, according to Stokstad:
“We created something that won’t go away,” says Janice Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University and lead author on the new paper. “It’s now circulating around the globe.”
That truth can be extended to all of our so-called disposable society; nothing, especially plastic, ever truly goes away.
I’ve also gone to other websites to see where this plastic menace is coming from. Plastic bags, certainly. Plastic bottles. So convenient. But most of it comes from tiny plastic fibers that break down, like the ones we use to make carpets, and clothes. Here’s a few sentences from the critical and terrifying website, www.plasticsoupfoundation.org:
Around 16% of the plastic produced annually in the world consists of textile fibers. In recent decades, production has grown by 6% every year and is now around 60 million tons per year. Synthetic clothing is responsible for endless amounts of microfibers, which can even be found in drinking water.
Synthetic clothing, like all our shirts made of rayon and dacron and who knows what else, and the fibers of which they are all made; all our shirts and pants and coats that are so waterproof and keep us warm and safe from the cold and elements and are so easy to wash and dry and don’t have to be ironed—well, unfortunately, they break down into these tiny micro-fibers and particles that get picked up by the wind, and rain down the way acid rain used to, only now they blow all over the planet and infiltrate our soil, our water, our bodies:
Research has already shown that we probably ingest microplastics at a rate of 11 particles per hour… The presence of microplastics in human lung tissue was already demonstrated in the 1990s by scientists investigating lung tissue of cancer patients, who expressed their concern that plastic fibers may contribute to the risk of lung cancer…Research showed that plastic particles might persist in the lungs, especially in people with lung disease. When particles would remain in the lungs, they likely stay there for a long time because they are bio-persistent, which could cause inflammation. It also matters how long the fibers are because longer fibers appear to be more damaging…Particle pollution has long been known to damage lung tissues, leading to cancer, asthma attacks, and other health problems.
There’s more, of course. Plasticsoupfoundation is doing yeoman service to, first, make the danger known, and second pressure oil companies to stop making more plastic and use recycled bottles instead. But the problem becomes one of cost: it’s cheaper in many instances (and certainly more profitable to Shell and other plastics makers charging full speed ahead with new production facilities) to manufacture new plastics. And, of course, governments tend to be reluctant to chastise large corporations and make them conform to recycling. So we’re left with the plastic menace, which consists not only of the plastics themselves, but of the additives that are used to make carpet and couch fibers flame-resistant, but which, many of them like BPA in bottles to make them harder, have been shown to be endocrine disruptors. But hell, what’s a little infertility when it’s all so convenient and long-lasting and profitable?
I could go on, citing the problems with the pesticides we’ve added to our crops to make them less vulnerable to bugs, and the fertilizers we’ve added to our soils to make them more productive, and the hormones we’ve added to our farm animals to make them less susceptible to disease, and the bioengineering we’ve done to plants and animals to make them more machine-pickable or tender or white-meat dominant for our chicken tenders, and on and on. But you probably know all that. The point here is not to list the modern horrors we’ve created that plague our world, and whose costs are only now becoming evident. The point is, what price convenience? What is the cost of progress? Is progress even possible? Can we clone ourselves and our animals to eliminate any chance of disease or waste or breakdown? And more important, should we, do we have enough intelligence and restraint and foresight to mess with our genes, our DNA, the very code of life? Or is it, has it always been, a fool’s errand? Have we been fooling ourselves all along, thinking that we can waterproof and waste-proof and infection-proof and illness-proof and work proof and gene-proof and death-proof ourselves?
The myth of Prometheus suggests that perhaps we have been fooling ourselves. Comforting ourselves with our contemporary myth of progress. And that perhaps we should put more of our faith and our effort into trying to come into better harmony with our world, rather than muscle that world into a version that seems more convenient in the short run. Perhaps we should heed the wisdom masters, who have said all along that acclimating oneself to what is, rather than straining to invent or produce what might be, is the better part of valor. That is to say, we humans are not, ever, going to eliminate difficulty. Pain. Sorrow. Suffering. For these are the ineluctable elements of our human condition. Not the only elements to be sure. There is joy and happiness and ecstasy and discovery. There is the pleasure of friendship and family and community and useful work. And growing old. And seeing one’s progeny thrive. And seeing justice sometimes emerge from the courageous effort of some of us and, sometimes, all of us. But nothing can bullet-proof the human organism from suffering, decay, and death. One can be intelligent about the risks one takes. One can accept the advice of those who seem to know what prophylactic or corrective measures to take that give one more advantage in any crisis. But one cannot eliminate risk or effort or work or pain altogether. That being so, one is better advised to, yes, do the footwork, but in the end accept that the outcome will not always be success or even survival. But even there, when survival is questionable, there is the world, in all its daily beauty and complexity and persistence. There is the blood that courses through one’s veins on its own; the cells of one’s body that reproduce themselves on their own; the miracle of growth that seems to magically proceed on its own, even when humans do their utmost to fuck it up. And there is mostly and simply now, this moment when I am sitting here typing at my plastic keyboard on my plastic computer lamenting all this plastic coming back to haunt us, but still—still operating, somehow still alive and part of the inexhaustible, glorious and never-to-be-fully-comprehended or improved-upon universe. And sometimes, perhaps more of the time than we usually know, that might just be enough.
Lawrence DiStasi
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