© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 149
Categories make life easy, even if they do lead to stereotyping and generalization.. Putting things in boxes is the only way to go, especially if you are a natural scientist, a paleontologist or a parent with a child and a room full of toys. And the same is true for historians and the study of history.
Historians have wonderful ways of describing broad eras. For instance, there was the stone age, the bronze age, the feudal era, the industrial era and now, more recently, the information era. I suspect that the latter will turn out entirely wrong though. It will probably be classified as ‘the time just before we really started paying serious attention to global warming’.
One of the things that worries me about global warming, aside from almost everyone’s uncanny ability to brush it under the carpet, is the impact that it is having on attitudes to technology and particularly materials such as oil and plastic. To my mind, no matter what you say, oil is good: it’s uncontrolled pollution due to stupid use of oil that is bad.
That being said, I can easily imagine life with electric cars or horses. A life without plastic is what worries me the most. And given that oil is vital in the process of manufacturing plastic, I am even less convinced that oil is a bad thing.
Once upon a time, plastic was something that happened in bad toys and cheap Asian economies, a synonym for ‘ersatz’ and ‘superficial’. Today, however, plastic is actually so pervasive and so useful that it is almost impossible to imagine life without it. Take a simple thing like a computer for instance: without plastic, no computer. There you have it. And if you think you can live without the computer, imagine a hospital without those latex gloves. Without plastic we would have to go back to queuing in banks.
In Cuba, where there seems to be a shortage of plastic, people hoard plastic shopping bags when they get them, and even use them for wrapping gifts. I assume they use retro paper bags instead, and we all know what that does to the world’s forests, though Cuba can not be blamed for deforestation on its own, even if you are a conservative voter.
And if you are a parent, can you imagine life without plastic toys? The wooden and medal stuff is horrifyingly expensive. ‘Made in China’ is fine as far as kids are concerned. If you don’t believe me, buy a plastic toy from that region and ask a kid if he or she likes it.
Perhaps it is time to reassess plastic, in light of how dependent civilisation is upon the stuff. Instead of disdaining it when it lies on the street in the guise of litter, we could be more appropriate, and cluck, shake our heads and moan about the waste of a precious resource.
Aside from the melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, mud slides, earthquakes, floods, famine, new diseases, old diseases, water wars, economic refugees, mass extinctions, outrageously expensive fish fingers and summers that are even hotter than they are now, the one other thing that really scares me about global warming is life without plastic.
The past few decades have been classified as the age of the aeroplane and the information era. Perhaps it would be better classified as the plastic era, and without any irony in spite of the yuppies.
There will be purists and eco-fundamentalists out there who have nothing good to say about anything I have just said. Once again, plastic in itself is not bad: it is pollution in the manufacturing of plastic, and littering, that is bad.
Biodegradable plastic is not a solution either. The idea of a prized cellphone going mouldy as you use it is about as appealing as a dead fish. So, like it or not, aside from the environment, global warming also means we have to preserve and find better ways to use plastic.
Civilisation is tenuous at best, and, if unambitious or uncontrolled, it tends to subside to a lower level. At the moment, civilisation as we know it is actually under threat. So don’t just throw away your plastic bags. Find a way to reuse them.
