The Sad, Sad Irony Of Human Productivity
We’ve become very efficient at making very big messes.
It’s all over the news. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we’re toast. I counted 4–5 headlines in my newsfeed yesterday on just the news that we’ve blown past 1.1 C of temperature rise on the planet. 1.5 C is supposed to be the tipping point to total global disaster, and we don’t seem to be very much closer to stopping our greenhouse gas output.
Another trend that is not so much in the news is that plastic is everywhere. Plastic is breaking down into tiny little pieces that can be consumed by the food we eat. Nature continually breaks down plastic until it is just a few nanometers in size, and by then, it can breach the blood-brain barrier.
And the last one, just for good measure, is that chemicals from farming are everywhere. Glyphosphate is in the land, the groundwater, and has been showing up in breast milk for at least a decade. And that is just one of many chemicals we use on our farms to keep the weeds away from our food.
All of these trends have been in the news in one form or another within the last decade. They are all messes we’ve made, and that's just three of them. All of them are the result of our “productivity” and all of them will require an enormous, and very expensive effort to clean up. In short, it seems that with every increase in productivity, we keep making more work for ourselves.
We used fossil fuels to start the industrial revolution and to power our economy. That put carbon dioxide into the air, driving the concentration of CO2 from 280 parts per million to 410 ppm now. C02 will stay in the atmosphere for 300–1000 years. And that gas will warm the planet in ways we have not imagined yet. Well, the planet Venus gives us a clue.
We use plastic in just about everything, even our clothes. Plastic is made from oil, the same stuff that gasoline is made from. The best estimates I have found suggest that plastic will last up to 600 years in the oceans. The humble plastic bottle will last about 450 years on land and up to 1000 years in a landfill.
Glyphosphate can stay in the soil for up to a year. It’s carried throughout the environment by water. No one really knows how long it…
