In defense of plastic trash . . .

In my second, yet unnamed book on Tierra del Fuego, Segundino, Seg for short, decides to start a newspaper, so he hires a lady named Betty who is a magician with words and can write either side of an argument. Here is an excerpt . . .

When I went to see Betty, she asked me to give her carte blanche on her writing. If Domitila didn’t like it and it didn’t get published, we didn’t have to pay her. Her requests seemed not only fair, but reasonable, so I contracted her to write an article once a month and, as I had correctly predicted, her one article created the most controversy, by far. Knowing her, it was no trick to make such a calculation and similar to the smoker’s rebuttal, her well-written words always blew the roof off at Darwin’s. By now, Domitila had sold the rights for reprinting Betty’s articles to more than a dozen other papers, enough to pay her fee thrice over and then some. She had turned out to be a real find and her viewpoint, although often called “harebrained,” “ludicrous,” or “off the wall” by some, were deliciously fun to read, with just enough logic, twisted perhaps, but logic nevertheless, to make them feasible and encourage conversation, the same way ten pounds of dynamite on a steep snow-covered mountain slope inspires an avalanche. The more remarkable was that here she was, at the end of the world, living a life of quiet austerity, when in reality she could have been working at the London Times or any other big city newspaper, making considerable more than she was making here, and where she would no doubt have also been a favorite. On the other hand, by now I was used to finding surprises in Tierra del Fuego, in the ocean, on land, in the air, everywhere, so it seemed natural that I would run into her.

Her last article, for example, was on the plastic trash along the beach and the plastic garbage floating in the middle of the ocean, along our roads, overflowing our landfills, and for the most part ubiquitous, including microscopic bits of plastic that can now be found floating in the water we drink, even if that water arrives factory filtered in a sanitized brand named bottle.  

Her premise was simple: The planet had always wanted to have something permanent, but found itself unable to come up with anything stable enough to remain unaffected by change. Whatever it came up with would eventually recycle itself. It might take a month, a century or several million years, but sooner or later, nothing stayed the same, since change, same as the speed of light, had turned out to be a constant: regrettably, another one of those immutable laws of nature, like gravity, or the fact that opposites attract. Even so, the planet wanted something that was permanent, hopefully everlasting, although try as it might, 4.5 billion years had gone by and so far, nothing had worked and it was running out of ideas. Ironically, it was time for a change: it needed a partner, a surrogate, something that could not be found among the thousands of elements, minerals, chemicals and other components it had at its disposal and had been mixing, combining and coalescing over and again in a million billion different ways since day one. This time the planet had decided to try something different, something new and unique, in other words, something from the world of the living, from biology. According to Betty, the planet had elected to gamble a small amount of time and energy into a newly evolved ape that had just learned to communicate using noises made with their mouths such as yaps, howls, yowls, growls, whines, wails and whistles, plus others, but mostly shrieks and moans. This rapid transfer of information was new, useful perhaps and the animal looked promising. So the planet gambled that this ape and its newly acquired communication skills might lead to something different. Surprising perhaps, but the wager had paid off. In less than two hundred thousand years, present day man had miraculously evolved from apes and was busy making plastic in record amounts. It had built factories, lots of them, and through clever marketing was making plastic an integral part of everyday life. Considering the length of time the planet had been around, percentage wise, two hundred thousand years wasn’t much, only about four thousands of one percent, in rough round numbers: in other words, no time at all. As far as the investment in energy goes, that wasn’t a gamble in the least, since the planet, thanks to the sun, had an unlimited supply, with no small amount of energy in the form of heat contributed by radioactive decay in addition to the four thousand plus miles of molten metal, mostly iron, still bubbling at its core.

Granted, there were risks, and some life forms were suffering, but plastic was bringing all kinds of new possibilities: in the ocean, hermit crabs were using bottle caps when adequate shells weren’t available, and as they grew, they could upgrade to bigger and more colorful caps of which there was an endless supply. Plus, there was no waste, as the smaller caps, with no visible signs of wear, would immediately be claimed by lesser crabs that were themselves looking to upgrade. Likewise, small fish used plastic bottles for a nursery, same as the roots in a mangrove swamp, a place that well protected the smallest creatures from their bigger predators. Similarly, tangles of nets plus other fishing paraphernalia, such as buoys, wooden crates, ropes, oars, tarps and the likes, found floating in mid ocean vortices, provided shelter, same as a coral reef, for an untold number of creatures were there were none before. And we had yet to study what happened to all the plastic that sunk to the bottom; no point in just assuming it was necessarily bad. On land it was no different.

Nonetheless, she wrote, the planet on the whole, was not interest in life, unless it was more human life so as to have more plastic. In the end, what it really wanted was permanence, and with plastic it had finally found what it wanted. About the only thing that could get rid of it was fire, and there was little of that, especially underwater.

Like I said, Betty was a magician with words and her articles were fun to read and provoking. Nestor, who claimed to sell twice as much beer during a good controversy was already one of her biggest fans.