David Wallace-Wells has written an opinion piece for The New York Times. The hard copy version of the headline on that opinion piece reads this way: "The World Is Now Unavoidably Toxic." Click the link just provided, and you will (perhaps) be able to read Wallace-Wells' article. That presumes, of course, that you can avoid a possible paywall. Those who have a library card from the Santa Cruz City-County Library System can get free access to The Times. If you are a person who could obtain such a library card, think about signing up!
Online, the title on Wallace-Wells' opinion piece is shorter than the hard copy version. It reads as follows: "You Are Contaminated." The image above accompanies the online version.
I was struck, as I read Wallace-Wells' piece, that the "contamination" he describes is, essentially, all derived from human-made materials. You can think "plastics" as a shorthand descriptor.
We are imperiled, in other words, because we have not been willing to "make do" with the world into which humans have been born. Longtime readers of my blog postings know about my "Two Worlds Hypothesis." We live, most immediately, in a world that we, human beings, create ourselves. Ultimately, however, we live in the "World of Nature," or the "World That God Created," to use another way of describing it.
We have not been satisfied to live within the limitations of the "World of Nature," and because we haven't, we are now "contaminated" (and, perhaps, "unavoidably").
Would it be possible, even now, to start redesigning our human civilization (the world that we create) in a way that would, actually, reject the enticing idea that we should be able, ourselves, to manufacture the realities upon which our civilization depends?
As I like to point out, in the world that we create, "anything is possible," including a decision to forego the temptation to find human-created substitutes for what the "World of Nature" makes available.
If we don't want the Earth, and our own bodies, to be "unavoidably contaminated," then we need to avoid the temptation to try to build a human-created world that replaces the "World of Nature."
Anything really is possible! We could do that!
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