Matt Simon, author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.

A podcast I caught on the local community radio station today, to sort of follow up on yesterday’s tropes and just tell even harder truths.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, humanity entered what the anthropos call The Anthropocene Age.

What it means is essentially that there is no part of the Earth’s surface that is ‘virgin’ or wilderness anymore, no place that is free of the catastrophically bad things we’ve done to the planet

Matt Simon talks about pulverized tire dust from Europe drifting onto Arctic ice, and microplastic fallout raining down on the unsuspecting heads of indigenous people deep inside the African continent, and how the stuff we made so thoughtlessly has ended up inside our blood and our brains–no matter if we eat organic exclusively, no matter if we recycle like good citizens.

To tie it back to yesterday’s post … we get sold on perma-straws to replace the ones that ended up so photogenically in the noses of sea turtles. We get sold electric cars on vaguely the same premise. But the problem ultimately isn’t what we’re sold, or what we buy. It’s worse. It’s that we are bought and sold a such a furious brainless pace.

It’s that we’ve been conditioned to consume and consume and take the path of least resistance to ‘convenience’, and things that are supposed to make us happy.

The problem is industrialism, colonialism, and rampant late-stage capitalism, and all the things you and I have been taught to believe around those false gods.

And believe it we do.

100 billion more for Ukraine, everybody, while people are sleeping out in sub-freezing temps in New York tonight, trying hard not to die. And a free Slurpee with every purchase, amen.