Thoughts on Earth Day

 The first Earth Day was 22 April 1970 – 53 years ago yesterday. I had just finished my classes at Pitt and was set to graduate in May. I was back in Reading and gathered with friends at a celebration of what my generation (the Boomers) felt to be important because we were helping to save the planet. The world population was estimated to be 3.7 billion and the U.S. population was 203 million. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325 parts per million. We had not detected a hole in the ozone layer. There were 200 million motor vehicles in the world and 118 million of them were in the United States.

How naive we all were in 1970. If one looks at the comparable numbers today, we are an immensely different world. Way more people, way more vehicles, way more carbon dioxide in the air. It wasn’t that we did not recognize what was happening in 1970. It was because it was easier and a lot more fun to go about our business in a manner that not only continued to pollute our environment but did so at an exponentially increasing pace. Now my generation has matured (at least chronologically) and our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are taking this problem on. Will they succeed where we have not?

The monster in the room is obviously climate change which was not much in the vocabulary in 1970. Warming oceans, melting ice, rising sea levels, changes in precipitation (too much and floods, too little and drought) – these are the challenges we leave to the younger set. There is a lot more to the picture than these macro effects. 

Mark O’Connell wrote a great essay in the New York Times on April 20th entitled Our Way of Life Is Poisoning Us. In the essay he points out that our ingenuity and dexterity with organic chemistry has circled back to bite us in the butt. We constantly breathe, drink, and eat what are called microplastics. Plastic is of course a 20th century phenomenon which made its way quickly into civilization around the world. Global plastic production rose from 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 390 million tons in 2021. But the numerous organic polymers that make up the myriad variety of plastic have been created in a world that is incapable of rapidly degrading them. In many ways, plastic is forever. Just watch this scene.

As I sit here at my desk, there are a large number of plastic items in view – containers, tape dispensers, a lamp. I have a favorite fountain pen that I purchased in 1979 and still use. Of course, a lot of plastic is ephemera. When it is discarded, it will often be broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, degrading into microplastics. But microplastics arise from the everyday activities we engage in. Drive your car? Your tires wear and create a lot of microplastic. Take a walk around the block? Your shoes wear as well and microplastic enters the environment. Water your garden? Microplastic leached into the stream enters your vegetable bed. Wash your clothes? Fibers of microplastic down the drain and off to the oceans.

Our facility for manipulating carbon chemistry has also produced other wonders that may have tremendous unintended consequences. Our marvelous modern pharmacopeia is possible because of organic chemistry. What happens when a person (or animal) ingests a drug? It is excreted and ends up in the environment, often altered but also often still metabolically active. While there are methods to remove these compounds, they are nowhere near 100% effective. Antibiotics in the environment also contribute to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant microbes which are a threat to human health. And then there are the endocrine effects. Hormones in wastewater are incompletely removed with treatment but many organic chemicals, such as bisphenol A, are endocrine disruptors – they mimic the effects of real hormones on animal systems. We already know these chemicals have effects on fish. How about humans? Human fertility, specifically the production of sperm, may be impacted by endocrine disruptors. Of interest is that microplastics tend to adsorb endocrine disruptors, thus magnifying their biological effect.

As has often been said of the increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere warming the planet, we are in the midst of an immense experiment in which we are both the experimenters and the subjects. It is easy to see the macro effects. The effects of pollution are often harder to see. Humanity has created an estimated 8.3 billion tons of plastic since 1907 when Leo Baekeland made Bakelite in the laboratory. Those 8.3 billion tons are another ticking time bomb that we need to better understand and develop means to ameliorate. Ah, 1970. So naive in the spring sunshine of Berks County that year. Reminds me of that Pennsylvania Dutch saying: Ve Gedt Too Soon Oldt Und Too Late Schmardt.