Against plastic and fear

From Wednesday's dawn post (LISTEN):

...Speaking of cars, we'll start with them (see yesterday's post) in Environmental Ethics.

Then, that lovely passage about the Panthalassa Sea (etc.) Barbara Kingsolver had Hope Jahren read in their conversation at Harvard Bookstore. "The plants we burn," that flourished in sea and forest and 200-300 million years ago and became the coal, oil, and gas we fuel our lives with today, are not forever. They're non-renewable, and they may not last the century.

We fool ourselves into a false sense of complacency about that, with our innovations and our general confidence in the magic (in Arthur C. Clarke's ironic phrase) of technology. Take biofuels. "Today, 20 percent of the grain grown on planet Earth is converted to biofuels--that's a huge fraction for a planet that is also home to eight hundred million starving people." And biofuel energy wouldn't last the week, if we tried to substitute it for fossil fuels. (109)

And then there's plastic...

Remember The Graduate, and the word Benjamin Braddock was told to remember? "Almost ten percent of the plastic we throw away makes its way out to sea, where it has congregated into massive floating rafts of trash..." Some legacy.

But Hope's last words today are the ones I hope we'll hear. "I've found that fear makes us turn away from an issue, whereas information draws us in... It's not time to panic, it's not time to give up--but it is time to get serious. Fate has placed you and me squarely at the crossroads of environmental history."