PLASTIC

To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

 

 

 

HERE IS THE BOTTOM LINE: the world is being killed. It is being murdered. And one of the ways it is being murdered is that it is being poisoned: the waste products of this culture do not help landbases—as waste products are supposed to do, and have always done—but instead they harm and kill them. In nature there is no waste. Waste in this sense is a modern invention. And it’s a rotten one.¹¹⁶

As epidemiologist Rosalie Bertel has pointed out, the probable fate of our species is extermination by poisoning. We could at this point add that this is the probable—in fact, looming—fate for the oceans, the air, the soil, the bodies of most every living being.

All of the fancy talk of sustainability—by us and others—is just dancing around the central issue: this culture is killing the planet.

This culture is killing the planet.

This culture is killing the planet.

This culture is killing the planet.

If we repeat this enough times, perhaps we will start to comprehend even the tiniest terrifying bit of what this means, and we will begin to act as if any of this matters to us.

I have in front of me a photograph. It is a photograph of a turtle. Or what would be a turtle. Or what could or should be a turtle, and of course still is a turtle, but is a turtle who got a plastic ring caught around the shell’s middle.¹¹⁷

The turtle grew. The shell surrounding the ring did not. The turtle—and I wish I were making this up—looks like an hourglass. I first saw this photograph a few weeks ago, and have not been able to get it out of my head, nor my heart. But of course there is a difference between feeling empathy for another and actually having to live the life of that other. I can walk away. I can live my life pretending nothing is wrong. The turtle cannot do that. The plastic ring deformed the turtle, changed the turtle’s life for much the worse.

Now I have another picture before me. It is of a river, or so I am told. I cannot tell, because there’s too much trash. As the accompanying article states: “It was once a gently flowing river, where fishermen cast their nets, sea birds came to feed and natural beauty left visitors spellbound. Villagers collected water for their simple homes and rice paddies thrived on its irrigation channels. Today, the Citarum is a river in crisis, choked by the domestic waste of nine million people and thick with the cast-off from hundreds of factories. So dense is the carpet of refuse that the tiny wooden fishing craft which float through it are the only clue to the presence of water. Their occupants no longer try to fish. It is more profitable to forage for rubbish they can salvage and trade—plastic bottles, broken chair legs, rubber gloves—risking disease for one or two pounds a week if they are lucky.”¹¹⁸

And now another picture. It is of the skeleton of a seagull. Inside the rib cage is a mound of plastic. There’s a sense in which this picture is less horrible than the previous ones, since it could have been staged: someone could have placed the plastic inside the skeleton.¹¹⁹ But I know that a study of fulmars—a type of seagull—in the North Sea revealed that the gulls had an average of forty-four pieces of plastic in their stomachs, weighing what in a human would be the equivalent of five pounds.¹²⁰ One animal had consumed and retained more than 1000 pieces of plastic.

Now I see a picture of a sea turtle with a plastic bag hanging out of its mouth; creatures in the ocean often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Sometimes they eat them. Sometimes they die.

Now I see a picture of a “ghost net,” a plastic fishing net that was cut loose from a commercial fishing vessel. The net hangs in the water, fills with fish, turtles, sea mammals, seabirds—anyone captured by it—and eventually sinks to the bottom. When the bodies decompose sufficiently to fall apart, the net floats again toward the surface, where it begins this process anew.

I’m sure by now you know the numbers. Marine trash kills more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and turtles each year, as well as unimaginable numbers of fish¹²¹—each and every one of these an individual worthy of consideration. There is at least six times more plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean than phytoplankton. (Imagine trying to eat and six out of every seven swallows bring only plastic; it is no wonder that so many sea creatures are starving to death, bellies full of plastic. Others die of constipation brought on by plastic blocking their intestines; having suffered a blocked intestine, with its pain at least an order of magnitude worse than a broken bone, I can tell you that I cannot imagine many more excruciating ways to die). This plastic is not degrading, but merely breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, until by now it is routinely found inside the cells of phytoplankton.

Plastic is everywhere in the oceans—and I mean everywhere—but it also accumulates where currents carry it. In these places the essence and endpoint of this culture could not be more clear. As one author wrote, “It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.”

The article continues, “How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the ‘Eastern Garbage Patch,’ Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.”¹²²

That particular “Garbage Patch” is nearly the size of Africa. And there are six others. Combined, they cover 40 percent of all of the oceans, or 25 percent of the entire planet.¹²³

It’s not merely river and ocean creatures—and rivers and oceans themselves—who are being murdered by plastic. So are land dwellers, including us. And frankly, although I love humans, at this point I feel even worse for those like the turtle, whose species have done nothing to deserve this, than I do for most, especially the rich humans whose lifestyles are causing these murders. At least rich humans get to drink from plastic cups and play with plastic Barbies and watch televisions housed in plastic—using electricity flowing through wires insulated with plastic—before these plastics poison and suffocate us all.

And plastics are poisoning and suffocating us all.

What is plastic? We certainly feel and see a lot of it. I’m typing this on a plastic keyboard, sitting on a chair that has plastics in it, looking at a screen framed by plastic, and when I’m interrupted by a phone call, the phone is made of, you guessed it, plastic. Later, my clock (one of those very popular clocks that uses bird songs to note the hour, which means that even as birds are exterminated in the real world we can all still hear their voices—or rather reproductions of their voices—on the artificial hour, every artificial hour, until the batteries run down) marks eleven, so I look there, and, well, we all know what it’s made of, too. We even ingest a lot of it, far more than most of us know. But I’m not sure a lot of us know what it is. I’m not sure I know what it is.

So I went to Google and typed in “What is plastic.” Surprisingly—although I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me—by far the most common result answered a somewhat different question: “What is plastic surgery?” Although it struck me as odd that in the marketplace of ideas more people might want to know about plastic surgery than the substance that they touch more than almost any other, more even than food or human flesh (I stroke a computer keyboard far more often than I do another human being, which is both pathetic and revolting; what is even more pathetic and revolting is that I never until this moment articulated that even to myself), I skipped over the sites about changing my own face and body and went straight to some detailing this substance that is changing the face and body of the earth.¹²⁴

Here’s what I learned: “Plastics are polymers, and are composed primarily of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.” I know about the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but what the hell’s a polymer? College was a long time ago, and at this point the only things I remember from my organic chemistry class are: a) organic in this context doesn’t mean “organic” as in “no petroleum-based pesticides or fertilizers,” but rather means “made of carbon,” which means that nonorganic pesticides are in this sense organic, which sort of clarity might help explain the only other thing I remember, which is; b) I got a C-. So, what’s a polymer? Oh, maybe I should quit worrying and read the next sentence: “Polymers are just very long chains of atoms which repeat over [and] over again.”

Okay. That’s what plastic is. Now how did it come to overrun the planet? Well, reading on, I learn that “Alexander Parkes, English inventor (1813-1890) created the earliest form of plastic in 1855. He mixed pyroxylin, a partially nitrated form of cellulose (cellulose is the major component of plant cell walls), with alcohol and camphor. This produced a hard but flexible transparent material.” Can you guess what Parkes named the stuff? Why does it not surprise me that, in this supremely narcissistic culture, this material that was fabricated with absolutely no concern for its effects on others was named, narcissistically enough, “Parkesine”?

The article continues, “The first plastic based on a synthetic polymer was made from phenol and formaldehyde, with the first viable and cheap synthesis methods invented by Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1909, the product being known as Bakelite.”

Baekeland invented Bakelite as an insulator to coat wires in electric motors and generators. This sticky mix of phenol and formaldehyde became extremely hard if heated, then cooled and dried. By the 1920s, Bakelite was commonly used in consumer goods. The website goes on: “It was molded into thousands of forms, such as radios, telephones, clocks, and, of course, billiard balls. The US government even considered making one-cent coins out of it when World War II caused a copper shortage.”¹²⁵ My favorite phrase in the previous paragraph is of course. “Of course, billiard balls.” Where would this world be without plastic billiard balls?

Actually, without plastic billiard balls, there would undoubtedly be fewer elephants, and without billiard balls at all, there might be no plastic. You see, although wood and clay were sometimes used to make billiard balls, “No natural material other than elephant ivory,” according to the Smithsonian Museum, “had the physical size, strength, and beauty to perform in the billiard room.”¹²⁶ Given this culture, it was pretty much inevitable then that elephants would be slaughtered en masse to keep up with the demand for billiard balls. The demand for piano keys took its toll, too, as did the demand for ivory combs and doodads, but by far the main factor in the economically driven crash of elephant populations was billiard balls. Yes, elephants were nearly driven extinct for billiard balls. Yes, I hate this culture. One reason billiards drove the demand was that while you can make hundreds of piano key slips from a single tusk, that same tusk will yield only between four and eight billiard balls. That’s one or two dead elephants per pool table.

Consequently, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the billiards industry offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who would invent an alternative to ivory for the balls. They did this not because they cared about elephants, of course, but rather because the slaughter was so great it was endangering their own industry.

To capture this fortune, the inventor John Wesley Hyatt began experimenting with Parkesine, and eventually invented what many call the first industrial plastic: cellulose nitrate. This compound worked great for billiard balls except for its rather unfortunate volatility: cellulose nitrate is also known as guncotton, and can be used as a propellant or explosive. It’s six times more powerful than black powder, but its instability renders it useless (or at least dangerous) in firearms. The substance is also known as flash paper, and is used by magicians because it burns instantly and leaves no ash. Be all that as it may, cellulose nitrate and other plastics that followed began to be used for billiard balls.¹²⁷

This brings us back to Bakelite. Although cellulose nitrate was useful for billiard balls (and might have been especially useful for James Bond-style stunts), and although cellulose nitrate is generally considered the first plastic, it’s not considered the first true plastic. That distinction belongs to Bakelite, in the twentieth century, in that it was purely synthetic, based not on any molecule found in nature.¹²⁸

This means that nobody—no animal, fungi, plant, bacteria: nobody—had ever eaten Bakelite before, which means nobody had ever broken it down into usable form for any landbase.

That’s a problem.

That’s a big problem.

No, that’s a really big problem.

I am acutely aware of the relationship between this culture’s fear of death and its fabrication of plastics and other materials that do not decompose. I am acutely aware of the relationship between this culture’s complete fear of natural processes—processes outside its members’ control; processes like aging, death, decomposition, consumption by others—and its fabrication of more or less permanent materials. I am also acutely aware of the relationship between the fabrication of these more or less permanent materials—which, because they are more or less permanent, do not help the land and air and water and the beings who live in these—and the ongoing murder of the planet.

I am further acutely aware of mortality—my own and others.

It is morning. My guts—remember the Crohn’s disease, the incurable, progressive Crohn’s disease—woke me from a dream in which my reading glasses, which age has forced me to start wearing these last few years, became increasingly insufficient as my vision became even more blurred.

But I awaken. I can see. I get up, joints complaining. My ankles, destroyed by one of the drugs I was prescribed to control the Crohn’s disease, are especially loud in these complaints. Sometimes I can’t walk.

Narcissus—my dog who did not die a few months ago, sixteen-year-old Narcissus, who no longer hears and whose eyes are cloudy and whose primary pleasures these days are getting pets, eating, sleeping, and dreaming whatever dreams old dogs dream—moans, then cries aloud from the pain and difficulty of merely trying to stand up. I help him. Once standing, he looks in my general direction and wags his tail. My heart breaks with love and joy and sorrow, as it does each time I look in his ancient face.

Yesterday I helped my mom in her flower garden. She, too, is getting older, and each day I see her I am acutely aware that both she and I are, as Pink Floyd sang, older, shorter of breath, and one day closer to death. These past few years she has begun speaking of who will get her handmade quilts after she dies.

She asked me to hack down or pull out dead lavender plants. She is getting too old, too tired, to weed quite as much as she used to, and grasses had choked out the lavender. I pulled out dead plants, acutely aware, as I am each time I help her here, that gardening is an attempt to stop succession, that it, too, can be and nearly always is an interruption of natural cycles.

Back to this morning. I pick up some old paper napkins from a visit to a restaurant, and I step outside. My ankles hurt. I hear songbirds calling back and forth,¹²⁹ and they remind me of the ongoing murder of the planet: yesterday I read a report of a forty-year study of songbird populations, many of which are collapsing, as are so many populations of so many wild beings. Bobwhites, down more than 80 percent these past forty years. Whippoorwills, down 70 percent. Boreal chickadees, down 60 percent. Rufous hummingbirds, down almost 60 percent. Creature after creature. And of course, because this is the mainstream press, they found a mainstream environmentalist—Carol Browner, former head of the EPA—to tell us that this is not an emergency. If human populations went down by 80 percent in forty years, the capitalist press would call this an emergency. (Or how’s this: imagine how the capitalist press would bray “Emergency!” if the gross national product (GNP) declined 80 percent in forty years. Hell, imagine how it would bray “Emergency!” if the growth of the GNP declined 80 percent in forty years. It’s a measure of the grotesque, irredeemable, and near-complete insanity of this culture that the GNP is deemed more important than life. I’ve written a dozen books on this insanity, and the horror and stupidity still stun me.) At this point, though, I’m not sure that most creatures would be sad to see us decline. And I couldn’t blame them. There would also be creatures who would complain that the decline had come too late to save much of the planet. And I couldn’t blame them either.

Part of my point is that there is of course a difference between death and death. There is a difference between the death of this chickadee and the death of chickadee communities. There is a difference between the death of an individual and the deaths of entire species, communities, the planet. Our fear of the former is a major cause of the latter, in part through our desperate attempts to create permanent—nonbiodegradable, in other words, inedible—materials, which is a subset of our desperate attempts to control, which is a subset of our desperate attempts to deny personal death (our own, as we kill those around us).

I know the altitude here, and I know that all of these beautiful trees, all of these beautiful creatures—at the moment I see two large banana slugs tangled together, and last night I carried a frog from the relatively sterile linoleum of my kitchen to the riot of life outside—will be doomed if global warming proceeds even much less fiercely than many predict.

I squat. My knees, ankles, and starting this past month even my elbows, creak. I let go. More food for the soil, the slugs, and ancient Narcissus, standing here wagging his tail.

I have seen the results of this culture’s quest for immortality, and these results are not pretty. We have achieved a sort of immortality, and its name is plastic.

This quest for immortality is wrong, not only because life requires death, not only because we must be eaten just as we eat, not only because it manifests wrong thinking and wrong being in the world, and not only because it is killing the planet, but also because it stems from a fundamental confusion about what will continue. Like all toxic mimics, it takes a truth and distorts or perverts it.¹³⁰ In this case it confuses the continuation of the living landbase with our own personal (and cultural) continuation.¹³¹

Maybe, I think, it would help if we would drop our narcissism, drop our precious pretense that everything is here for us and that we are the point or even the star of this heartbreakingly and stunningly beautiful show—and somehow transfer our allegiance back to our natural communities, transform our longing to them, transfer our desire for continuation to them and to the ever-surprising processes of life itself.

The point is not to freeze ourselves or anyone else in time, like so many insects stuck in so many clear plastic paperweights, but to fall into the heartbreaking and joyful processes of living.

Before I get up to go back inside, I look once more at the beautiful redwoods and fir and spruce and alder that surround me. I look at wispy clouds forming and reforming before my eyes. I look at tiny flowers who bloom only a few days before they close, make their seeds, then die, and whose names I do not know. I look at the slugs. I look at the soil, made of decomposed leaves and grass and wood and shit—my own and others—and home to (and made up of) so many creatures living, eating, shitting, loving, dying, decomposing. I look over at Amaru’s grave, the grave that like everything and everyone else here will be under water if or when the ice caps melt. I look at the happy face of the ten-year-old border collie cross I rescued from a pound—for his own sake, and to be a friend to Narcissus, and to be a friend to me. I look at my own hands, see that they, like the rest of me, are aging (my mother says she realized she was getting old when she put her arm into the sleeve of a sweater, and saw her mother’s hand come out the other end). I am getting older. Someday I will die.

And then I look once more at Narcissus, at his sweet devoted face and at his cloudy eyes, and once again my heart breaks with love and joy and sorrow, as it does each time I look at his ancient face.

By now plastic is almost everywhere. By everywhere I mean in a huge portion of consumer products, in food and packaging, in liquid containers and the liquids they contain. By everywhere I mean in the oceans and in the air and on the land. By everywhere I mean on Mount Everest and in the Marianas Trench and in remote forests. By everywhere I mean inside every mother’s breast milk, inside polar bear fat, inside every fish, inside every monkey, inside every songbird, inside every frog. And rest assured, it’s inside of you, too.

And that’s a very bad thing.

Let’s start with poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants in products as varied as computers, carpeting, and paint. They’re also used extensively in automobiles, and along with pthalates (more on them in a moment) contribute to that “new car smell” that, while romanticized by some, in truth signals the off-gassing of poisons. PDBEs have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss.¹³² For the last three decades, the quantity of PDBEs dumped into the environment has doubled every three to five years. Not surprisingly, the load of PDBEs in our bodies has also doubled every three to five years (which means we have about 128 times as much of these PDBEs in our bodies as we did only twenty-eight years ago).¹³³

Pthalates, used to make plastic soft and pliable, are just as bad. Industrial civilization fabricates about a billion pounds of pthalates per year. Pthalates, used in millions of products from varnishes to cosmetics to the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals to packaged food, leach readily enough from those products so that by now they are found in our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, amniotic fluid. Pthalates are toxic to our reproductive systems.¹³⁴

But the danger of pthalates doesn’t stop there. In some food containers and plastic bottles, pthalates are used in tandem with bisphenol A (BPA). Industrial civilization pumps out about 6 billion pounds of BPA per year, and it’s found in nearly every human being, and presumably a similar proportion of nonhumans (not that most of us particularly care about them). The effects on living beings are horrific. Exposure levels of only .025 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day (at this point low levels of human exposure from diet are around 1.5 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day, and relatively high levels are around 13; of course prior to the invention of plastic, everyone’s ingestion was at precisely zero micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day) cause permanent changes to the genital tract, as well as changes in breast tissue that predispose cells to the effects of hormones and carcinogens. Two micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day lead to a 30 percent increase in prostate weight (have you wondered why there are so many ads for chemicals to reduce the effects of enlarged prostates?). At 2.4, the victims (for that’s what they, or rather we, are) suffer early puberty and a decline in testicular testosterone. At 2.5, there is an increased risk of breast cancer (and you have noticed the explosion in breast cancer rates, have you not?). Doses of ten micrograms per kilogram per day lead to increased risk of prostate cancer (Do I need to keep putting in these parenthetical comments, or do you see this now in your own life and the lives of those you love?). That same dose leads to decreases in maternal behavior. Double it and you’ve got damage to eggs and chromosomes. Raise it up to thirty micrograms per kilogram per day and you’ve got hyperactivity, and also a reversal of normal sex differences in brain structure (where are those damn family values people when you need them?). Raise it all the way to fifty-one micrograms per kilogram and you’ve finally exceeded what the United States deems safe exposure.¹³⁵

Of course industry liars, I mean, representatives, tell us repeatedly that bisphenol A is safe and that our exposure is tiny. But then again, industry liars—I mean, representatives—are paid to lie about—I mean, represent—the financial interests of the corporations, the rest of us (and the world) be damned. Literally. In this case, these lies take the form of doing tests on rats specially bred to be immune to the effects of this chemical, and then passing off these studies as meaningful; failing to disclose the fact that they’re receiving money from chemical or plastics corporations; attempting to bribe scientists whose studies reveal bisphenol A to be dangerous; doing the sorts of statistical manipulations we’ve come to expect from corporate scientists; and of course good old-fashioned lying (as well as any number of forms of lying that would surprise even the most jaded).¹³⁶

But bisphenol A is not the worst of the plastics. That honor probably belongs to polyvinylchloride, or PVC. PVC is also one of the most common plastics: over 14 billion pounds are manufactured each year just in North America. About 80 percent of this is used for construction, and a good portion of that is used for piping, and for vinyl siding and flooring. But it’s also used to insulate wires and for carpet backing, window and door frames, shower curtains, furniture, gutters, weather stripping, moldings, and so on.¹³⁷ And of course it’s also used extensively in hospitals, in everything from bedpans to catheters to enteral feeding devices to hemodialysis equipment to gloves to tubing. This gives people dioxins in two ways: through leaching, and through inhalation of smoke from burning this equipment later in the hospital incinerator. As Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, said to me, “What are we going to do with the irony that conventional western health care is such a toxic industry? They incinerate PVC medical devices that have been used to treat your cancer, sending the toxic residue out to cause someone else’s disease. What sense does that make? They use mercury in thermometers in hospitals, then send that up the incinerator to be deposited in fish and eventually to give your child brain damage. Where does that make sense?”

Of course none of it makes sense.

Back to PVC. Part of the problem with PVC is that it’s a product of the chlorine industry, and has by now become the single largest use for chlorine. We’re all familiar with one form of chlorine: it’s in salt (sodium chloride). But the chlorine industry uses vast amounts of (taxpayer-subsidized) electricity to break that chemical bond and release an extremely reactive and rare form of chlorine. Also released are dioxins—lots of them.

Dioxin is the general name for a whole class of chemicals (polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, for those of you whose grades in chemistry were higher than mine) that exist in trace amounts in the natural world, but are for all practical purposes creations of the chemical and plastics industries. Dioxins are some of the most toxic substances imaginable, dangerous at doses of several parts per trillion (the equivalent of a few drops contaminating a trainload of liquid many miles long). They are highly carcinogenic and poisonous, and they also bind to the hormone receptors of cells, modifying not only the cells’ functioning (which would be bad enough) but also their actual genetic structure. Further, dioxins bind with fat, so they get stored there and when someone else eats this fat, they also eat the dioxins. Once they’re in your body, you are, for the most part, stuck with them.¹³⁸ Most dioxins have half-lives of between four and twenty years in your body.¹³⁹

Unfortunately, dioxins are not made only when PVC is manufactured. They can leach out from the PVC itself, and they’re also produced when PVC is burned. There are many other industrial sources of dioxins as well, including the infamous Agent Orange, but also including the production and use of chemicals such as herbicides and wood preservatives, the refining and burning of oil, car and truck exhaust, and so on. Dioxins are, truly, an inevitable by-product of the chemical and plastics industries.

You’ll be glad to know, however, that the PVC industry has your best interests at heart. In response to increasing outrage over the effects of dioxins on human health, in the 1990s the Vinyl Institute came up with a plan. The Institute stated, “The short-term objective of the plan is to mitigate the effects of negative press coverage by positioning the vinyl industry as a proactive and cooperating entity, working in tandem with EPA to characterize and minimize sources of dioxin.” And how did this “cooperating” work? Well, the Vinyl Institute and the Environmental Protection [sic] Agency cooperated on a plan whereby the PVC industry would be the sole supplier of information about dioxin emissions: it would collect, analyze, and interpret all of the data, and hand these interpretations to a criminally credulous EPA, which would then put its stamp of approval on this “data.” These two members of this criminal conspiracy to poison us all agreed that this data could be peer reviewed, but because the collection processes themselves are confidential—invisible even to the peer review committee—there is no way for anyone outside of the industry to have any idea of the veracity of any part of this process.¹⁴⁰ Which of course is the whole point.

Don’t you feel so much safer now?

Pthalates, bisphenol A, and dioxins are all in a class of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, meaning that they can, as one writer put it, “disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that [sic] have sprouted female sex organs.”¹⁴¹

It ends up that, as Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Reproductive Medicine, says of pregnant women, “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.”¹⁴²

Further, exposure, for example, to BPA also can make its victims fat (with both more and bigger fat cells). In the words of Dr. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics (and whose research has caused him to remove every polycarbonate plastic item from his home, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods), “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.”¹⁴³ BPA also causes victims’ insulin to surge and then crash. Is there a correlation between the rise of plastic and the 735 percent increase in diabetes in the United States since 1935?

No, of course not. There couldn’t be.

Please.

Please.

And this culture isn’t killing the world.

And the oceans aren’t full of plastic.

And neither is my body.

Somebody make it stop.

Somebody stop this insanity before it kills us all.

No, we can’t wait for somebody. We have to do it.

I sometimes picture the people who will come after the current planetary blowout (presuming humans survive, presuming any life survives). I go back and forth on what I think they will say about plastic. Sometimes I think they will stand in disgusted amazement and say, “You had lightweight waterproof containers, and you threw them away?” (Or maybe they’ll still have them, since the damn things don’t decompose). And sometimes I think they’ll stand in disgusted amazement and say, “God damn you for making plastic in the first place.”

More and more I suspect the latter.

Gosh, would life be worth living without CDs, plastic pacifiers, plastic wrap, sandwich bags, syringes, bottled water (and soda bottles), single serving packets of potato chips, automobiles, straws (and crazy straws!), plastic grocery bags, freezer bags, ice cube trays, bubble wrap and packing peanuts, carpet-backing, Styrofoam life preservers and take-out trays, disposable pens, disposable diapers, hairspray and plastic hair brushes, plastic toothbrushes (and toothpaste!), milk crates, packing tape, plastic forks, telephones, computers, hair clips, billiard balls, shower curtains, beach balls, balloons, latex condoms, and polyester pants?

Surrounded by all of these necessary wonders, it can be easy to forget that humans lived without plastics for tens or hundreds of thousands of years—and to the best of our knowledge, they lived relatively cancer-free for tens or hundreds of thousands of years—and that plastics were invented only a century or so ago. By this point, plastic is central to modern life. How could we live without it? But if you think that life without plastic is unthinkable, the deeper truth is that life with plastic may very well be impossible.

Part of the answer to living sustainably is not simply to reuse materials that should never have been made in the first place. It’s to not make them at all.

Just to drive the point home, here is another extremely incomplete list of some of the health effects of exposure to various forms of plastic: physical deformities, cancer (brain, breast, cervix, colon, testicular, prostate, and on and on), early puberty, immune deficiencies, endometriosis, behavioral problems, lowered intelligence, impaired memory, impaired sexuality, low sperm count, motor skill deficits, reduced eye-hand coordination, reduced physical stamina, and much more.¹⁴⁴

Industry liars and their pet politicians will of course point to an inability to tell which poison (from which factory) caused which particular cancer. I don’t disagree that it may sometimes be difficult to pin down the precise murder weapon. As Paul Goettlich wrote, “Since we do live in a sea of man-made toxicity, there is great difficulty in pinpointing exactly which chemical or combination of chemicals was the cause of a cancer or deformity.”¹⁴⁵ But industry liars and their pet politicians will then say this uncertainty is reason enough for them to continue business as usual: It would cause undue economic damage to remove this chemical—which makes all of your lives so much better and easier—from the free market without clear proof of the harm it is alleged to cause. That’s absurd, and it’s murderous. Not knowing which specific carcinogen gave my grandfather cancer or my friend breast cancer or my other friend uterine cancer or my other friend’s mother breast cancer and her father prostate cancer or my other friend leukemia (She has a t-shirt that reads, “My father dropped Agent Orange on Vietnam, and all I got was this lousy leukemia.”), and so on, is like standing on a battlefield watching your friends die, yet not knowing precisely which gun fired which bullet that killed your grandfather, your lover, your friend, your child. The situation is not one that calls for bemused academic interest, it calls for action: we need to stop the bullets, and if those on the other side won’t stop shooting at us, then we need to stop them, using any means necessary. Likewise, if those on the other side won’t stop poisoning us—and I guarantee they’re not going to stop because we ask nicely, or because our grand-parents die, or because our children die, or because we sign petitions, or because they’re killing the world, or because they agree to closely cooperate with the EPA—then we need to stop them. Using any means necessary.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all too big and too scary, and after all, we don’t know precisely which poison killed your grandfather, made you sick, killed your dog, made it so you can’t fish anymore at your favorite fishing spot because the fish all have tumors, killed your cousin, killed your mother, killed your niece, made your nephew fat, made your granddaughter develop pubic hair and breasts before she entered preschool, gave your sister asthma, gave frogs eight legs, fucked up the genitals of alligators and fish and seagulls, messed with your ability to remember, messed with your ability to think clearly, killed your best friend from childhood, and so on. And of course if we don’t know precisely which poison did each of these—if we can’t nail it down with 100 percent certainty—then fuck it, we should just keep studying—or rather let industry and government keep studying—until there is nothing left of the world. After all, it’s only our lives that are at stake, and the lives of those we love, and the life of the planet.

Good luck.

Things are actually far worse than I’ve described. To get the barest hint of how bad they are, just think for a moment about nurdles.

Nurdles are rabbit-poop-sized resin pellets not yet made into full-fledged plastic products. They make up about 10 percent of all plastic ocean trash. For obvious reasons, they’re essentially impossible to clean up.

Part of the problem—apart from the fact that there are so damn many, and apart from the fact that the nurdles themselves are poisonous, as are all plastics—is that nurdles bond with other poisons such as dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and dioxins. In fact they attract these other poisons, so that concentrations of these toxins can be a million times higher than in the surrounding water.¹⁴⁶ You read that correctly. A million times.

It gets worse. Nurdles are the size of fish eggs, and often when they’re not ingested incidentally they’re ingested by mistake. But the reasons don’t much matter, because in either case ingested along with the nurdles are other toxins, at rates up to a million times higher than in the already polluted oceans.

But who cares about a bunch of fish and whales and albatrosses, right? Clearly not many of us in this unremittingly narcissistic culture, or we wouldn’t allow this culture to perpetrate these atrocities in the first place. But don’t forget that these toxins are stored in fat, and ultimately they end up in you. Yes, you.

The United States produces about 300 billion pounds of plastic per year. Billion. Not million. Billion.¹⁴⁷

As Captain Charles Moore, the discoverer of the “Garbage Patch” in the Pacific puts it, “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed.”¹⁴⁸

Here’s another way to put it. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, has said, “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig . . . you’d find a little line of plastic. What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves. . . . The ocean is warning us, and if we don’t listen, it’s very easy for her to get rid of us.”¹⁴⁹

If we were only disrupting our own genetic structure and hindering our own ability to reproduce, there are many who would say good riddance to the members of this culture who are killing the planet.

But this culture is taking everyone else down with it.

Once again, there are those in the wild who I am sure would not be sad to see this culture go. The fulmars and albatrosses starving with bellies full of plastic. The alligators and fish whose genitals have been made ambiguous by this culture’s poisons. The infant orcas dying because their mothers’ breast milk has been rendered toxic by this culture’s poisons. The turtles deformed by plastic rings, the fish and whales and birds caught in ghost nets. The ocean herself. The earth herself.

I would be hard pressed to blame a single one of them for their sorrow, their rage, their hatred.

I feel that sorrow, rage, and hatred myself.

Do you?

What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to stop these atrocities? How far will you go? What will you do to make yourself worthy of the life that this planet has given you? Where is your allegiance? What will you do?

And why aren’t you doing it?

Most especially given the near infinite depth of this culture’s narcissism, abusiveness, and its perceived entitlement to exploit, I need to be clear. I do not hate human beings. I love humans, and I love humanity. But I love a living planet far more.

And that is how it should be.

I need to emend what I just wrote. I love humans, but I do not love what so many humans have become. I hate what this culture has done to us, and I hate that so many value profits and power over life. I hate the narcissists who are killing those I love. I hate those who are poisoning the planet, who are poisoning my landbase, who are poisoning members of my family, who are poisoning me. I hate them, and I will stop them from killing the planet.

Who will join me?

I need to be clear about something else. Humans are not killing the planet. Industrial humans are killing the planet. Humans who identify more with this culture—this culture of plastic—than they do with life are killing the planet. Humans lived on this planet for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without destroying it. It is only in the last 6000 years or so that a culture toxic enough to kill the planet has emerged.

The choice we face is not between killing ourselves and killing the planet. The choice we face is continuing this way of life that is killing the planet (and us) or not. We can allow this culture to kill the planet, or we can destroy this culture. It really is that simple.