When I’m writing this piece in the early 21st century, humanity has become increasingly aware of the runaway damage that is being caused to the human body and the environment at large by the enormous amount of plastic that is being produced and then immediately thrown away. Story after story recounted the millions of tons of plastic being thrown away every year to subsequently pollute the environment, creating non-biodegradable waste that could be a hazard for hundreds of thousands of years. Study after study began to demonstrate that microplastics had found their way into practically every part of the human body in billions of people around the globe, the negative effects of which are still not entirely understood at the time of this writing. For all the people living through this crisis, and all the people in the future who will be forced to deal with plastic pollution, it is a justifiably concerning issue. How long will humanity be forced to pay the price for overuse of plastics in the 20th and 21st centuries? Perhaps a better question is, could this crisis have been prevented, or mitigated in some way?
My answer to that question is no. The short answer to why is that people are really really bad at guessing the long term impacts of their decisions, or even stopping to wonder if there will be long term impacts. A template could be written for all the times a new technology, method, or material has been rapidly adopted to benefit humanity, only for humanity to realize that there is a downside. That downside might only make itself apparent years, decades or centuries later.
Here are some examples of this short term thinking that I can list off the top of my head. Using coal, natural gas, and oil as an energy source (think of the downsides in both the use and extraction of these resources). Putting lead and asbestos in a host of things. The widespread use of CFCs that burned some holes in the ozone layer of the atmosphere. The radioactive byproducts of nuclear weapon development and testing, and from fission power plants. All of these things and a lot more than I can think of all had or have these upsides and downsides. Some of the downsides can be mitigated, or weighed against the benefits if used responsibly. Talking through the ups and downs and responsible use are difficult and complicated discussions that are well worth having. How often do those discussions take place before something is widely adopted though? How many environmental impact studies were done to gauge the effects of plastics on people and the environment before we started churning out millions upon millions of tons of the stuff?
Some of these technologies or materials were developed and being used around the globe long before there was any way to study their detrimental impacts, but I don’t view that as an excuse, I see it as a warning. Humanity can kill itself faster than we can save ourselves, in fact, we are capable of killing ourselves without even realizing what we are doing.
There’s also another angle to this issue that I haven’t talked about yet. At this point I’ve been assuming that if only people knew the negative impacts of something they wouldn’t use it, or they would be more careful and cautious about its implementation. Is that true though? What if people would profit mightily from exploiting a technology or resource? If they learned of the downsides to what they were doing, would they stop for the good of humanity and the planet? Or would they continue to exploit the resource that makes them money? Are people so selfish and shortsighted that they would help poison humanity and the planet just to make a little more money in addition to the money they already have? Yes, they are that selfish and shortsighted. There are plenty of examples of an industry learning about the downsides to what they’re doing long before it becomes a subject of public discussion, and the industry works mightily to bribe lawmakers and to change or confuse the narrative so they can keep hurting people and the planet for as long as they can get away with it. It would be bad enough if people were simply stupid or ignorant and only had to be educated into changing their ways. So much harm has been done by people who were perfectly aware of what they were doing and did it anyway, because as long as it doesn’t affect them personally it doesn’t matter.
This observation leads me to ending this piece sounding like a broken record, because I don’t think there’s anything for us to do about this problem. I could say that humanity needs to be less selfish and greedy and that we need to develop better foresight to better gauge the long term impacts of our actions. That way we might be able to slowly roll out a new technology or material to see what environmental impacts it might have before it’s used on a global scale and we realize it’s been poisoning us the entire time. But how likely is that? Can humanity really overcome the allure of new wealth to be gained from a new convenience? Will humanity need to deploy some artificial intelligence to think through all the potential consequences of our actions for us? Could that be the only way we avoid the same pitfalls that we seem to find?
About the only thing I see to do right now that might provide any catharsis at all is for the present to damn the past for how it’s poisoned the present. In the meantime the future can damn the present for how it’s poisoning the future. Finally, the past can laugh at the present and the future because they haven’t learned a damn thing.