I can think of another reason this doesn’t get talked about more: the plastic spoon in our brains has not just incorporated itself, it has colonized and activated a self-preservation mode. Good fodder for a sci-fi novel.
Someone told me yesterday they only drink bottles water because they don't trust other water. I think your article would break their brains, that is, if they could even bring themselves to read it! I think your #3 theory is probably closest. When I stop to think about how ubiquitous plastic is in our lives, doing something about it feels completely unrealistic. Pretty awful.
I have been aware of this for a long time now and gone through similar changes in how I felt positioned in the world and the whole inside/outside boundary. I came across a bunch of feminist discourse about female embodiment and how it is much more attuned to living with foreign stuff inside it. Including of course men (briefly) and children. The texts provided interesting elaborations on the theme. "Sponge orientation", was my personal coinage.
On the brain plastic and barrier issues I recently read an article claiming that there is in fact a problem with measuring methodology relating to the oliads and the plastics and that incineration of cholesterol (myelin) produces the same kinds of vapors as plastic and that the mixed up vapor cannot distinguish if it is plastic or a false signal from the nerve signal insulation (myelin). This still does nothing to falsify the studies that show pthalates can be measured in blood after holding a shopping receipt between the fingers for a short time (I think it was a minute or so) due to the coating on the heat printed receipt at the cashier.
And on the human biome issue... And rising levels of bowel cancer in young people... The probiotic food intake and highest possible diversity of plants, nuts etc organic and perhaps even unwashed, fresh, picked by oneself might be worth considering to get as much gut diversity inside ourselves as possible...on the input side.
On the output side of the digestive tract, perhaps we will all have to act like pornstars and clean outside and in, to adapt and survive. To turbocharge throughput and aid absorbtion of nutrients from produce, which is itself providing us with declining nutrition values due to depletion of soil biome health. Or something...
The truth hurts because there is One for All. One planet for all of us and one life for each of us. Thank you for your writing and contribution to encourage thinking of a better way forward for humanity in all your writing. If it is okay with you I would like to connect to share your writing on my substack because it aligns with why I wrote One for All. If you have time please check my writing before you give your thumbs up. Https://kwaldron915.substack.com/s/one-for-all-series by the way my name is Karen, a.k.a. K.Waldron:)
I don't really write on my substack because there are millions of voices trying to be heard and getting into the battle to be heard is a fools errand, imo.
I do read like a mad dog, trying to keep up and trace our cultural developments and I comment too much, mostly because I feel that it's the best way to contribute to the various conversations which tend to cluster around the same hot topics with the accompanying hot takes. I pick the most salient writing (like Malte's) either to share perspective, or to push back against what I think are weaknesses. This generates engagement metrics for writers and potentially starts good discussions about this and that. Not always. But whenever it does, I often brings more engagement from others who jump in, etc.
Your stack looks like you have good intentions, and that's great. But I think you are out of your depth, to be honest.
I don't want to appear to be giving you a mental spanking in public, so perhaps some private DM might be best if you want feedback.
What I can say is that I think you overextend yourself into trouble, argumentally speaking. Trying to include the whole world is biting over too much. Positioning yourself to take on the totality of the problem is impossible. You are where you are. Act locally. If you frame the Canadian charter stay inside the border. Bringing in the UN is trouble for your argument. Basing everything on rights is trouble. There are no universal rights. Rights are promises made by governments and theoretically ensured, upheld, and crucially, enforced. The UN has no enforcement mechanisms in any meaningful ways. It's all voluntary and so, mostly fluff and performance. That is not to say the UN is useless, but it remains a half finished project of global governance. Laws without a police force to enforce much of anything.
I could go further, but it descends into a quagmire.
A last point. You write of "guarding all life" or something similar and it's just untenable. Plants and animals die for most of our meals. If you place people as exempt, you walk into the same trap as those who destroy what sustains us. So you need to use something like "the circle of life" as your starting point. We are all born and we all die. That we should be food for something is fair, when other life is food for us. Let that mosquito have a feed. And the leech, if it finds you. 100 leeches is too much, obviously, but if you embrace the model you begin to reorientate to the concept of metabolism. How much do we need to survive, and when are we killing stuff for unreasonable goals? The bear must fatten up to survive winter, but it has limits. We seem to take everything we can get our hands on and that's the problem.
Great post. But pessimism, imho, is just a matter of perspective.
Just as biological bodies and the consciousness they carry are permeated by industrial material, so industrial material is growing in consciousness. Not plastics, but silicon.
The world of the future is not one coming back to primal cycles of biological life, but intelligent life transcending its biological limits.
And with it, concerns such as this.
Of course, you can resist it individually. But in some way, it’s already an irreversible reality—unfolding in time for your perception, but already present in its finality.
Thank you for a very well written and informative article. To say, the least, the implications are disturbing.
I wonder if you or any of your readers have encountered any disconfirmatory evidence or arguments about the quality or validity of this body of research?
If so, then those perspectives would be worth sharing in this discussion thread.
That said, the evidence, unfortunately, seems quite strong.
Given the ubiquity of micro-plastic pollution, it’s not hard to understand why so many of us might avoid thinking about this subject. And then of course there are the vested interests of the oil and plastics manufacturing industries, and the sheer convenience of these materials in modern life, as you point out.
This is yet another wicked problem to add to the growing list.
It’s beginning to look as if Frank Herbert’s Dune novels - in which of course the ‘spice’ was an analogue for petroleum in our own world - are closer to reality than even he perhaps realised. The spice, just like the ubiquitous oil derived plastics that you write about here, permeates the living tissues of every one of its habitual consumers in Herbert’s future universe.
Your remarks about the profound interconnection between ourselves and our environment also strike me as very close to the mark. You (and some of your readers) may be aware that the same argument can also be made in psychological terms - that our consciousness and our agency are not like software, as often conceived within our technical-industrial civilisation- rather, they are thoroughly embodied - arising always from an interaction between our physical being and our milieu.
The dissident British clinical psychologist David Smail developed these themes in a series of books which blended philosophical and political analysis with his own clinical experience. He came to see that, rather than trying to fix distressed people as if they were machines, we should instead regard them ( and ourselves ) as being more like trees that might be nurtured, rather than ‘cured’. It’s hard to imagine any kind of workable large scale ‘cure’ for the plastics pollution catastrophe that you describe. However, a cultural shift toward the view that should be striving to take care of the world and each other would be a good starting point, hard though it is for me to imagine that happening before it’s too late.
Great work on this, thank you.
I can think of another reason this doesn’t get talked about more: the plastic spoon in our brains has not just incorporated itself, it has colonized and activated a self-preservation mode. Good fodder for a sci-fi novel.
Someone told me yesterday they only drink bottles water because they don't trust other water. I think your article would break their brains, that is, if they could even bring themselves to read it! I think your #3 theory is probably closest. When I stop to think about how ubiquitous plastic is in our lives, doing something about it feels completely unrealistic. Pretty awful.
Hi Malte
I have been aware of this for a long time now and gone through similar changes in how I felt positioned in the world and the whole inside/outside boundary. I came across a bunch of feminist discourse about female embodiment and how it is much more attuned to living with foreign stuff inside it. Including of course men (briefly) and children. The texts provided interesting elaborations on the theme. "Sponge orientation", was my personal coinage.
On the brain plastic and barrier issues I recently read an article claiming that there is in fact a problem with measuring methodology relating to the oliads and the plastics and that incineration of cholesterol (myelin) produces the same kinds of vapors as plastic and that the mixed up vapor cannot distinguish if it is plastic or a false signal from the nerve signal insulation (myelin). This still does nothing to falsify the studies that show pthalates can be measured in blood after holding a shopping receipt between the fingers for a short time (I think it was a minute or so) due to the coating on the heat printed receipt at the cashier.
And on the human biome issue... And rising levels of bowel cancer in young people... The probiotic food intake and highest possible diversity of plants, nuts etc organic and perhaps even unwashed, fresh, picked by oneself might be worth considering to get as much gut diversity inside ourselves as possible...on the input side.
On the output side of the digestive tract, perhaps we will all have to act like pornstars and clean outside and in, to adapt and survive. To turbocharge throughput and aid absorbtion of nutrients from produce, which is itself providing us with declining nutrition values due to depletion of soil biome health. Or something...
The truth hurts because there is One for All. One planet for all of us and one life for each of us. Thank you for your writing and contribution to encourage thinking of a better way forward for humanity in all your writing. If it is okay with you I would like to connect to share your writing on my substack because it aligns with why I wrote One for All. If you have time please check my writing before you give your thumbs up. Https://kwaldron915.substack.com/s/one-for-all-series by the way my name is Karen, a.k.a. K.Waldron:)
Thank you so much
Hey Ms K
I don't really write on my substack because there are millions of voices trying to be heard and getting into the battle to be heard is a fools errand, imo.
I do read like a mad dog, trying to keep up and trace our cultural developments and I comment too much, mostly because I feel that it's the best way to contribute to the various conversations which tend to cluster around the same hot topics with the accompanying hot takes. I pick the most salient writing (like Malte's) either to share perspective, or to push back against what I think are weaknesses. This generates engagement metrics for writers and potentially starts good discussions about this and that. Not always. But whenever it does, I often brings more engagement from others who jump in, etc.
Your stack looks like you have good intentions, and that's great. But I think you are out of your depth, to be honest.
I don't want to appear to be giving you a mental spanking in public, so perhaps some private DM might be best if you want feedback.
What I can say is that I think you overextend yourself into trouble, argumentally speaking. Trying to include the whole world is biting over too much. Positioning yourself to take on the totality of the problem is impossible. You are where you are. Act locally. If you frame the Canadian charter stay inside the border. Bringing in the UN is trouble for your argument. Basing everything on rights is trouble. There are no universal rights. Rights are promises made by governments and theoretically ensured, upheld, and crucially, enforced. The UN has no enforcement mechanisms in any meaningful ways. It's all voluntary and so, mostly fluff and performance. That is not to say the UN is useless, but it remains a half finished project of global governance. Laws without a police force to enforce much of anything.
I could go further, but it descends into a quagmire.
A last point. You write of "guarding all life" or something similar and it's just untenable. Plants and animals die for most of our meals. If you place people as exempt, you walk into the same trap as those who destroy what sustains us. So you need to use something like "the circle of life" as your starting point. We are all born and we all die. That we should be food for something is fair, when other life is food for us. Let that mosquito have a feed. And the leech, if it finds you. 100 leeches is too much, obviously, but if you embrace the model you begin to reorientate to the concept of metabolism. How much do we need to survive, and when are we killing stuff for unreasonable goals? The bear must fatten up to survive winter, but it has limits. We seem to take everything we can get our hands on and that's the problem.
DM me if you want more feedback.
Great post. But pessimism, imho, is just a matter of perspective.
Just as biological bodies and the consciousness they carry are permeated by industrial material, so industrial material is growing in consciousness. Not plastics, but silicon.
The world of the future is not one coming back to primal cycles of biological life, but intelligent life transcending its biological limits.
And with it, concerns such as this.
Of course, you can resist it individually. But in some way, it’s already an irreversible reality—unfolding in time for your perception, but already present in its finality.
Yikes.
It might be all the plastic in my brain, but I really don’t know what to say after reading all that.
Noted, thank you for your feedback. I wish you very well in your endeavors. Everyone needs a good reality check and thanks for giving me mine.
Thank you for a very well written and informative article. To say, the least, the implications are disturbing.
I wonder if you or any of your readers have encountered any disconfirmatory evidence or arguments about the quality or validity of this body of research?
If so, then those perspectives would be worth sharing in this discussion thread.
That said, the evidence, unfortunately, seems quite strong.
Given the ubiquity of micro-plastic pollution, it’s not hard to understand why so many of us might avoid thinking about this subject. And then of course there are the vested interests of the oil and plastics manufacturing industries, and the sheer convenience of these materials in modern life, as you point out.
This is yet another wicked problem to add to the growing list.
It’s beginning to look as if Frank Herbert’s Dune novels - in which of course the ‘spice’ was an analogue for petroleum in our own world - are closer to reality than even he perhaps realised. The spice, just like the ubiquitous oil derived plastics that you write about here, permeates the living tissues of every one of its habitual consumers in Herbert’s future universe.
Your remarks about the profound interconnection between ourselves and our environment also strike me as very close to the mark. You (and some of your readers) may be aware that the same argument can also be made in psychological terms - that our consciousness and our agency are not like software, as often conceived within our technical-industrial civilisation- rather, they are thoroughly embodied - arising always from an interaction between our physical being and our milieu.
The dissident British clinical psychologist David Smail developed these themes in a series of books which blended philosophical and political analysis with his own clinical experience. He came to see that, rather than trying to fix distressed people as if they were machines, we should instead regard them ( and ourselves ) as being more like trees that might be nurtured, rather than ‘cured’. It’s hard to imagine any kind of workable large scale ‘cure’ for the plastics pollution catastrophe that you describe. However, a cultural shift toward the view that should be striving to take care of the world and each other would be a good starting point, hard though it is for me to imagine that happening before it’s too late.