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It's just nuts to me all the examples there are of this basic pattern, where a traditional organic waste pipeline that had worked great for millennia was abrupt
by mikepurvis 5y ago
It's just nuts to me all the examples there are of this basic pattern, where a traditional organic waste pipeline that had worked great for millennia was abruptly ruined in the 20th century by the introduction of plastic trash.
All the major rivers are essentially this— Yangtze, Nile, Ganges, plus a number of indigenous cultures which have disposal practices that very much do not work for long-lived plastic items (tossed off a cliff, etc).
- danans 5y agoArguably the same pattern exists in our historical energy consumption. We moved from societies that mined recently sequestered biomass for energy (AKA wood burning) to a society that mined biomass sequestered eons ago for energy (coal, natural gas, petroleum) without realizing soon enough that the former of biomass was mostly atmospheric carbon neutral and the latter type was not at all carbon neutral. And now we are paying the environmental consequences and trying to develop the global civic sense to fix the issue.