I’ve written about this topic before. And though I type on it, stare at a laptop screen framed of it, and am utterly surrounded by it, the idea is still provocative even to me, that plastic (an innovation so subtle yet ubiquitous) is also at the core of a potential threat to life on Earth. I took a real interest in this idea because it seemed obviously urgent, but because one particular aspect seemed totally, and a bit ironically neglected. The irony I find is, so many people fall back on the topic of the weather. Evidently, not so much when it counts. To help myself and others understand my somewhat radical thoughts about the environment, and to discuss such ironically neglected aspects, I present as preface three very real, very relevant facts about our planet and life, followed by obvious speculation about how these phenomena might be inter-connected and in such a way as to to change life as we know it.

The first of these facts, is, water is a critical resource to life on Earth but especially human life. And water is critical on both macroscopic and microscopic scales to this point to be sure. As a microscopic solvent for instance, water allows dissolution to take place, which anybody armed with a high-school-level biology and chemistry training can tell you, is an essential part to the metabolic processes of cells as well as other rather necessary-for-life chemistry. Macroscopically, water provides living things with essential forms of hydration. And the availability of hydration tends to spawn habitats for plants and other species, on which we have come to depend. Frankly, overstating the importance of at least these facets of water on our planet would be impossible. And to most people, this is all quite obvious. So, we’ll move on.

Conversely, the second fact to present is not so obvious: In the same way oceans have formations which take shape above them called weather, they also create formations on their own surfaces and within themselves. The quote below, from The Daily Galaxy, discusses a physical proof of this kind of phenomena — its an island of floating plastic. This proof has also been mentioned on this blog in the past in a piece aptly titled The Future Is an Ocean of Plastic inspired by Best Life’s article entitled Plastic Ocean. But, I think we all can agree the proof for such formations within the ocean and on its surface hung just above the ocean, as clouds, for quite some time.

The UN Environment Program estimates that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter every square mile of ocean, and a swirling vortex of trash twice the size of Texas has spawned in the North Pacific.

The third and final fact is that, the water on the Earth is in constant motion. This means not only in the oceans as currents but on the same and perhaps even larger scales in the skies, water impacts our environment thereby influencing all the life within. All these different phases of the movement of water on the planet, from ground, to ocean, to sky, and back again, are known as the Hydrologic cycle. This cycle describes a process where evaporating water vapors form clouds and the clouds re-distribute their contents as rain and various other forms of precipitation, as well those behaviors, properties and processes all associated.

Now, after thinking about those three things, namely: 1) Water is essential, 2) Water helps the orchestration of (global) formations from weather to continental-sized aggregates like islands of plastic, and 3) Those formations can influence life; I would hope you would speculate as I do: 1) What happens when substantial sum of complex polymers become a regular component to the planet’s Water cycle? 2) Haven’t we already begun breathing and ingesting at least some of these materials as they’ve become part of the critical processes which distribute materials all over the Earth? 3) How could we ever adapt to or survive on a planet in such condition? I realize with new certainty we live in a world of consumerism, as it seems even survival will be shrink wrapped.