Almost All Ocean Plastic Gone-But That’s Not Good News

Relatively recently, after many decades of struggle, it was announced that organophosphate pesticides (Dursban, Malathion and many others) are far more toxic than was previously admitted by manufacturers and previously acknowledged by the EPA. Chlorpyrophos (Dursban) was banned for “home” use, but pest control professionals are still able to use it. This after decades of denial by chemical manufacturers and methodical stonewalling of EPA regulations by employing the now common tactic of manufacturers presenting “their studies” to refute independent studies. You may recall similar, but less sophisticated, tactics being employed by chemical manufacturers of organochlorine pesticides (DDT and relatives), tobacco, asbestos, and others.

Now we learn that there is a strong connection between organophosphates and autism: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-risk-higher-near-pesticide-treated-fields/

We faced similar struggles with endocrine disruptors…until the EPA finally (FINALLY) got around to condemning BpA and other xenoestrogenic compounds – which led to BpA-free this and that – but it’s still in food can liners.

Relative to the GPGP and other toxic islands of waste, what’s my point? My point is that plastic waste in the food chain (and wiping out the food chain, as it does when larger species consume enough of the ‘whole’ plastic films and other materials to kill themselves) will be much like mercury in the food chain. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, as they say, and we face decades of denial from the fishing industry and food distributors who will, no doubt, claim that ingestion of this plastic waste in the human diet is harmless.

Humans are guilty of many things, but one of the most surprising is the gullible, self-sacrificing willingness to be unwitting subjects in an uncontrolled experiment being conducted by industries on the worldwide population. For some reason we are willing to subject ourselves to toxic chemicals, GMOs, growth hormones, rampant overuse of antibiotics, widespread exposures to hormone-mimics, massive consumption of sugars and salts in lieu of real food, mechanical processes that puncture pathogens into the flesh of meats we consume, and many other highly suspect contaminants. For some reason, flaming tap-water isn’t evidence enough of the hazards of fracking. Oil spills that decimate the Gulf of Mexico don’t really phase us.

I’ll add that the phenomenon also resembles the self-destructive tendency of lower-middleclass and middleclass individual to succumb to the siren song of so-called “conservative values language” rather than scrutinizing the policies of those same conservative politicians. The so-called Reagan Democrats were stunningly oblivious to the self-inflicted harm they endured at the hands of Republicans who systematically dismantled unions and the middleclass in much the same way as Sentinels (Squids) in the Matrix dismantled the craft of the resistance. When Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers’ union, where was the outrage? Instead, “Joe Sixpack” sided with Reagan and turned on the unions.

There’s a common thread here. We, as a society, will ignore threats such as climate change and even defend the corporations most responsible for creating these problems rather than attempt to hold them accountable. We’ll pretend that the GPGP is not a problem…that pesticides are just fine, that endocrine disruptors that are causing premature puberty and a broad variety of reproductive abnormalities pose no real threat, that drilling in the oceans isn’t a necessary evil as much as it is a boon to the economy.

Humans seem to suffer from a disease. The disease is greed. But the greed is far more insidious than it appears on the surface. Those that “have theirs” have an understandable greed. But what drives the rest of us to accept the truly harmful byproducts of their greed? I believe that those of us who “do NOT have theirs” will tolerate the effluent of greed because we are gamblers at heart. We, as humans, are like lottery addicts. We will endure virtually perpetual, inevitable loss on the very long-shot chance that we, too, will get ours one day. And we don’t want to do anything that might undermine our chance to grab a piece of the poisoned pie.