‘Great concern’ as study finds microplastics in human placentas

‘Great concern’ as study finds microplastics in human placentas

By Elizabeth Claire Alberts / Mongabay

  • A new study has found microplastics present inside human placentas, which could potentially affect fetal health and development.
  • The microplastics probably entered the women’s bodies through ingestion and inhalation, and then translocated to the placentas, the study suggests.
  • While further research needs to be done on the subject, it is believed that these microplastics could disrupt immunity mechanisms in babies.

Plastic is everywhere — literally everywhere. A growing body of research shows that plastic is not only filling the world’s oceans and wilderness regions, it’s also invading our bodies through the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we consume. And now, a new study has shown that microplastics — tiny plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters but bigger than 1 micron — are even present inside human placentas, posing a potential risk to fetal health and development.

Published this month in Environmental International, the study examined six human placentas from women who experienced healthy pregnancies and births. During delivery, the obstetricians and midwives followed a “plastic-free protocol,” swapping plastic gloves for cotton ones, and not using any plastic equipment or supplies to avoid cross-contamination.

The researchers found a total of 12 microplastic fragments in four of the six placentas. Three of these pieces were recognized as polypropylene, a plastic commonly used in food containers and packaging. While the other pieces were harder to identify, they appeared to be plastic bits from “man-made coatings, paints, adhesives, plasters, finger paints, polymers and cosmetics and personal care products,” according to the study.

The effects of microplastics in the human body on health are still largely unknown, but the researchers said it was “a matter of great concern” due to the critical role the placenta plays in fetal development.

Lead author Antonio Ragusa, director of obstetrics and gynecology at the San Giovanni Calibita Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, said it’s likely that microplastics would be present in the babies themselves, although further research would need to confirm this.

“I cannot support it with scientific evidence, since ours is the first study in the world on this topic, [but] I think that if we could look for them we will also find microplastics in the organs of the newborn, because the placenta is a temporary fetal organ, and not a maternal organ,” Ragusa told Mongabay in an emailed statement. “Of course this is just a guess.”

While all of the babies were healthy at birth, Ragusa said that the microplastics in the placenta had the potential to “alter several cellular regulating pathways … such as immunity mechanisms.”

“The presence of MPs [microplastics] in the placenta tissue requires the reconsideration of the immunological mechanism of self-tolerance, a mechanism that may be perturbed by the presence of MPs,” Ragusa said. “In fact, it is reported that, once present in the human body, MPs may accumulate and exert localized toxicity by inducing and/or enhancing immune responses and, hence, potentially reducing the defense mechanisms against pathogens and altering the utilization of energy stores.”

The researchers say it’s likely that the microplastics entered the mothers’ bodies through food ingestion or through respiration, and then translocated into the placentas.

Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, who was not involved in the study, said he wasn’t surprised by the findings: “I’d say with complete confidence that using the right tools, we will find it in every part of the human body.”

A similar study has shown that pregnant rats forced to inhale nanoplastics ended up having particles present in their placentas, as well as the fetal liver, lungs, heart, kidney and brain.

“Considering it can move through rats like that, I wouldn’t be surprised if it can do exactly the same thing to humans,” said Deonie Allen, also a microplastics researcher at the University of Strathclyde.

Ragusa says he and his colleagues will be doing further research on microplastics with regard to maternal and infant health.

“We now have to understand if microplastics are present in the newborn at birth and we will do it by taking the umbilical cord blood at birth,” he said. “Another important step will be to understand if microplastics are present in breast milk.”

Citations:

  • Fournier, S. B., D’Errico, J. N., Adler, D. S., Kollontzi, S., Goedken, M. J., Fabris, L., Yurkow, E. J. & Stapleton, P. A. (2020). Nanopolystyrene translocation and fetal deposition after acute lung exposure during late-stage pregnancy. Particle and Fibre Toxicology, 17(55). doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-39676/v1
  • Ragusa, A., Svelato, A., Santacroce, C., Catalano, P., Notarstefano, V., Carnevali, O., Papa, F., Rongioletti, M. C. A., Baiocco, F., Draghi, S., D’Amore, E., Rinaldo, D., Matta, M., Giorgini, E. (2021). Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta. Environment International, 146, 106274. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2020.106274

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.


This article was originally published in Mongabay, please find the original article here. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Featured image: Microplastics found in a freshwater stream in Florida in 2017. Image by Florida Sea Grant / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Green Revolution: A Misnomer

Green Revolution: A Misnomer

By Salonika

The Green Revolution is a misnomer: it sounds like a radical environmental movement when it’s the exact opposite of that. It is a movement led by corporations (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) to further reinforce the class-based heierarchy, while spreading an ecocidal practice across the world.

The Green Revolution has promoted the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; hybridized seeds and high yielding crop varieties; expansion of irrigation infrastructure, and modernization of management techniques. It started in late 1950s and has been credited as the movement that saved the world from mass starvation. (The mass starvation seemed imminent due to the human population overshoot. The population was 3 billion at the time and since then has increased by more than 5 billion – an almost threefold increase!) Norman Borlaug, the father of Green Revolution, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for saving a billion people from starvation.

Currently a second wave of Green Revolution is on the way. Influential people like Bill Gates are pushing the use of Genetically Modified Crops (GMOs) in countries of Africa as a new solution to the upcoming starvation.

This is the dominant narrative regarding the Green Revolution. There are some important points missing from this perfect little story.

Lets delve into the history of the agricorporations first.

The agricultural corporations have an intertwined history history with the wars. During World War II, the agricultural corporations (then chemical corporations) produced explosives and poisons. Monsanto operation the Dayton Project and the Mound Laboratories, and was involved in the development of the first nuclear weapons. During the Vietnam War, Monsanto also poisoned Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with Agent Orange. The effects on human health and ecology can be felt to this day.

The war legacy of these corporations extends beyond this. According to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, Bayer had purchased 150 healthy women from the Auswitch concentration camp for experiments with sleep-inducing drugs. All of these women died during the experiments.

It is hard to believe that the companies that had no qualms in actively profiteering from wars, conducting war crimes, or purchasing humans, would simultaneously be sensitive to the sufferings of humanity. These corporations have proven time and again that they are willing to poison and exploit the oppressed (the poor, the women, those from the Global South) in pursuit of profit. It is ironical that proponents of GMOs use images of starving children in Africa to build a case in favor of these corporations.

Lets take a case of the state of Punjab in India.

The Green Revolution was introduced in Punjab in 1965. It has been credited for pulling India out of starvation.

In reality, there was no starvation in India in 1965.* A nationwide drought had increased the food prices, creating a need to import food grains. However, the US government and the World Band imposed a condition on the import of food grains and forced synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically redesigned crops to the farmers of Punjab. These synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were produced using the same chemicals that had been used to produce poisons and explosives during the Second World War. Native crops all over rejected these chemicals. So, the agriculture corporations genetically altered crops so that they would accept (and be dependent on) the synthetic chemicals. These crops later became known as the high yielding varieties and the hybridized seeds.

The Green Revolution has had serious implications in Punjab. The native biodiversity has been destroyed. Once, Punjab used to produce 41 varieties of wheat and 37 varieties of rice. Since the Green Revolution, all of this has been replaced by monocultures of imported crops.

These crops require further use of chemicals. It has toxified the entire ecology. A 2014 study found pesticide residue in 25% of breast milk sample collected from Punjab. In a culture where breast milk stands for purity and love of a mother for her child, a quarter of mothers cannot express this love toward their infants without simultaneously poisoning them.

The number cancer cases are so high in Punjab that a special train carries people suffering from pesticide-related cancer to Rajasthan (another state in India). This train is called the “cancer train.”

Technology transfer or wealth transfer?

The Green Revolution has been credited for technology transfer from the corporations to the farmers. In fact, it has resulted in a massive wealth transfer from farmers to corporations. The farmers in India are dying from an inability to pay the massive loans they have accrued. Since the 1990s, farmers suicide has been a national catastrophe in India. It is estimated that more than 10 farmers commit suicide every day. Ironically, or perhaps symbolically, most kill themselves on their fields by drinking pesticides.

I was once asked why the movement is called the Green Revolution. I said, “Because poison-your-land movement would have sounded less appealing.” It would definitely have been more accurate though!

Shale Must Fall: Global Day Of Action Against Fracking

Shale Must Fall: Global Day Of Action Against Fracking

Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North.

Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking.

The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry.

The day of action highlight how those government policies completely undermine the Paris Agreement, as Europe is simply “outsourcing” its emissions to the rest of the world.

The actions around the world are focusing on some of Europe’s largest climate criminals which are also shale oil companies—Repsol, Total, Wintershall, Shell, BP—by connecting the dots of their operations around the world.

It is outrageous that Europe is on one hand committing to emissions reductions and the Paris Agreement, yet on the other it is allowing and even subsidizing companies based in their country to frack the rest of the world, causing enormous harm to human health and to the natural world, and dooming future generations—including their own people—to climate chaos.

Local and grassroots movements from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South are mobilizing against the operations of these multinationals from the Global North demanding climate justice and an end to this international ecocide.

Solidarity is Strength

Each of the environmental resistance struggles at the frontlines in the Global South is usually not strong enough, if isolated, to defeat a threat so disproportionately larger. But as our struggles begin to come together as we are doing today, we can present a united multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.

The Harms of Fracking

Science has shown fracking to be responsible for more than 50% of all of the increased methane emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately 1/3 of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. Methane is 87 times more harmful than CO2 in its global warming impact on the atmosphere during the first 20 years, and thus the fracking industry is a major cause for accelerating global warming.

This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels.

After having banned or imposed moratoria on fracking in their home countries, European governments are not only allowing their companies to frack the rest of the world, but they are also subsidizing the import of fracked gas with billions of euros of taxpayers’ funds, by building LNG import terminals across the region that will lock the EU into decades of dependency into this fossil fuel.

They are selling the fossil fuel with the worst carbon footprint of all as a clean form of energy that will serve as a bridge to move away from coal. A transition away from coal with something worse than coal? This is insane and we have to stop it. Clean gas is a dirty lie!


 For more information on Shale Must Fall, check out their website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Fracking: Our Experience Is Not An Abstraction

Fracking: Our Experience Is Not An Abstraction

Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.


Experience Is Not An Abstraction

by Trinity La Fey

On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep.  Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells.  Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.

I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse.  The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom.  The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important.  So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):

“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”

While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.

So, harrumph.

Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.

Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend.  The names of places are all but erased behind them.  I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there.  From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.

From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.

The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.

I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters.  The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.

Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.

Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working.  Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions.  Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:

“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”

Boundaries are underrated.

According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it.  I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them.  I live in a hard place that I know very well.  Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing.  It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness.  Like Saga, they keep our stories.  Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril.  Or, as the article put it:

“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”

They recommend further monitoring.


Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.

References and/or Suggested Reading:

Featured image: fracking in progress by Joshua Doubek, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

The Highest Levels of Mercury Ever Found in Living Beings

The Highest Levels of Mercury Ever Found in Living Beings

This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.


By Cypress Hansen/Mongabay

  • Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
  • For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
  • While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.

Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,

said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”

Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.

While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.

The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.

The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.

“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”

Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.

Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .


This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/11/are-industrial-chemicals-killing-rare-whales-and-familiar-dolphins/

The Problem

The Problem

The Problem

by Lierre Keith
From the introduction to the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.


“You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.”

—Bill Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground.

A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On energy reserves less than a small bag of M&M’s and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she flies thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. Every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.

A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her energy reserves are meant to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, when she will give up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. But in some areas, the female’s weight before hibernation has already dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably open, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.

The Aldabra snail should weigh something, but all that’s left to weigh are skeletons, bits of orange and indigo shells. The snail has been declared not just extinct, but the first casualty of global warming. In dry periods, the snail hibernated. The young of any species are always more vulnerable, as they have no reserves from which to draw. In this case, the adults’ “reproductive success” was a “complete failure.” In plain terms, the babies died and kept dying, and a species millions of years old is now a pile of shell fragments.

What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair?

We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That’s 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We’ve all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?

There are voices raised in concern, even anguish, at the plight of the earth, the rending of its species. “Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet,” one pair of climatologists declare. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and “individual lifestyle adjustments” are “a deluded fantasy.” It’s all true, and self-evident.

“Simple living” should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them.

But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the popular one to draw. The moment policy makers and environmental groups start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google “global warming solutions.” The first paid sponsor, Campaign Earth, urges “No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We’re here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success.” By “realistic” they don’t mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices—cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice—which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skinning the planet alive.

As Derrick has pointed out elsewhere, even if every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. Aric tells a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American’s annual one ton of garbage production, “your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That’s thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste.”

Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

There is no kinder, greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. Could it be done more “efficiently”? Sure, we could use a little less fossil fuels, but it still ends in the same wastelands of land, water, and sky. We could stretch this endgame out another twenty years, but the planet still dies. Trace every industrial artifact back to its source—which isn’t hard, as they all leave trails of blood—and you find the same devastation: mining, clear-cuts, dams, agriculture. And now tar sands, mountaintop removal, wind farms (which might better be called dead bird and bat farms).

No amount of renewables is going to make up for the fossil fuels or change the nature of the extraction, both of which are prerequisites for this way of life. Neither fossil fuels nor extracted substances will ever be sustainable; by definition, they will run out. Bringing a cloth shopping bag to the store, even if you walk there in your Global Warming Flip-Flops, will not stop the tar sands. But since these actions also won’t disrupt anyone’s life, they’re declared both realistic and successful.

The next site’s Take Action page includes the usual: buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs. It also offers the ever-crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip-Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief.

The first noncommercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there are no exclamation points, but instead a statement that “[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual CO2 emissions.” This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step One? No, not stop burning fossil fuels—“Make Better Cars and SUVs.” Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands—for space, for speed, for fuel—in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scientists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that’s killing the planet, can’t we?

The principle here is very simple.

As Derrick has written, “[A]ny social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable.” Just to be clear, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you’ve grasped that intellectual complexity, you can move on to the next level. “Any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable.” Trees are renewable. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the forest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and forests as well as metal, coal, and oil. Now the oceans are almost dead and their plankton populations are collapsing, populations that both feed the life of the oceans and create oxygen for the planet.

What will we fill our lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which industrial civilization is replacing them? In parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1. Imagine if it were your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials—not just chemicals, but physical gunk—until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor is adequate for the dying plankton? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion?

But the oceans don’t need our metaphors. They need action. They need industrial civilization to stop destroying and devouring. In other words, they need us to make it stop.

Which is why we are writing this book.


THE DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE BOOK
Strategy to Save the Planet:

https://deepgreenresistance.net/en/resistance/the-problem/the-problem/