The Horrible Hope

One can arrive at a place of what appears to be maximal personal virtue. Vices have been eliminated. No drugs, no alcohol, no meat, no dairy, no tobacco, no junk food, no fornication. I buy organic. I am vegan. I exercise. I recycle. I compost. I consume on average less three kilowatt-hours of electricity per day in my humble studio apartment. I don't take public transit to work; I walk.

But recently I have been nagged by a suspicion that my apparent virtue is fraudulent. What makes me feel this way is that just about whatever I consume I deposit a nib of non-recyclable plastic into the garbage -- the little pull-top to the coconut milk container; the cap to mango juice bottle; the bag that holds the stir-fry faux-beef soy strips. Granted, it takes a while to fill up a trash container with these non-recyclable nibs and sheets. But in less than a month's time I have a shopping bag full of plastic destined for the landfill and from there likely the ocean.

That's why this blurb from today's Significant Digits caught my eye:

8,300 million metric tons of plastic

We humans have made a ton of plastic during our time on Earth — well, about 8,300 million metric tons. Most of it is now in the ocean or the dump. But some of it — like Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit or works of contemporary art — we’re trying very hard to preserve. Unexpectedly, plastics are a great challenge for conservators. The material is unpredictable and there is “huge variation in forms of deterioration.” [The New York Times]

If you're going to read one thing this weekend read Troy Vettese's "To Freeze The Thames," which appears in the May-June issue of New Left Review. It is a revelation.

The Little Ice Age of the 17th Century was likely triggered by a massive die-off of humans indigenous to the Americas. This returned a huge amount of agricultural land to the wild, which took a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Vettese says that we can achieve the same results without the die-off if we take most agricultural land out of production and return it to the wild. People will have to go vegan because a significant portion of agricultural is tied up in producing feed grain for livestock. 

Basically, E.O. Wilson's half-earthing is possible but almost everyone in the developed world is going to have to live a radically different life.

Sadly, this is politically impossible. So what we are left with is a hope that is hard to swallow: A massive human die-off in the next few decades.