[llamaimperative]

Nature absolutely does not have an equivalent because nature (sans humans) does not produce the scale nor types of refuse that we do. Superficial similarities like “sometimes it smells bad too!” are complete red herrings.

[scotty79]

Oil wells literally pump out stuff from purely natural dinosaur landfill. Coal mines extract material from tree landfills that happily accumulated waste for millions of years.

Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.

[llamaimperative]

Wait so which of those dead organisms that decompose were like plastic? Answer: None.

Interesting pattern in this thread of anti-alarmists thinking they’re privy to some special knowledge but actually it’s stuff everyone learns in like 5th grade (btw it wasn’t literal dinosaurs, but whatever).

[lazide]

At the time - wood. Wood was literally like plastic, and didn’t bio degrade.

Which is why we have veins of coal.

Near as anyone can tell.

[llamaimperative]

Which type of wood particulate is suspected of being endocrine disruptive and is being found bioaccumulating in the reproductive organs of ~every organism on earth?

[scotty79]

Coal was and still is responsible for so so many death. And it comes from biosphere landfill we dug up maybe too soon.

[llamaimperative]

Good response if the argument was natural == good, but it's not. Lighting coal on fire is also bad. Coal didn't suddenly zap into existence and then to global prevalence in air, food, and water within decades.

[lazide]

Wow, really trying to move the goalposts here eh?

Tannins, when they first were evolved, almost certainly. And they still are used by plants to kill pests, albeit it’s steadily been losing effectiveness and the typical biological arms race has been going on a long time.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannin]

Again, I’m not saying plastics are awesome or perfect or whatever, and there aren’t problems.

I’m pointing out that if you think ‘putting it in a hole in the ground’ is somehow worse than the ‘natural’ solutions that’s ridiculous.

Especially since ‘letting it sit where it was made and have things eat it’, or ‘accumulate in a hole until it gets buried’, or ‘get washed into a swamp or the ocean and accumulate until they get eaten, subducted, or broken down’ is a classic natural way for waste to be handled in nature. And there are plenty of natural things that are super nasty that this literally happens with all the time, and kills lots of stuff.

And nature regularly has huge die offs, poison events like red tides, etc. from purely natural causes. So clearly this isn’t a ‘solved problem’ in nature.

If we even had a single event like that for humans related to plastics (or even an identifiable single event in animals where we could see it), we’d be having a very different discussion.

If you were arguing for literally not producing plastic at all, then it might be a different discussion - but that seems to be clearly impossible at this point, and not what anyone is arguing.

[llamaimperative]

Uhhh that's not moving the goal posts except if you're starting from your own strawman. Burying gigantic amounts of plastic isn't suboptimal because humans bad/nature good/plastic ugly/etc., it's bad because of the actual effects that we're seeing in nature.

Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence

The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.

I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.

[scotty79]

I'm not anti-alarmist. I think we are screwed. And need to triage. Global warming first. If plastics save us some CO2 then we should use them. We will deal with them maybe next century. Same goes for nuclear. Sustainable farming and other things. Trying to solve all problems at once will ensure that we fail with solutions to all.

[llamaimperative]

I agree with prioritization but seriously disagree with your low-risk assessment of plastic. We have very good reason to suspect these compounds are disruptive to endocrine systems and we’re finding them bioaccumulating — even inter generationally — in almost every organism we look at.

Those two pieces of information by themselves should dramatically shorten your window of when this stuff will bite us, I.e. there’s good reason to suspect at least that our current obesity and fertility crises are significantly exacerbated by( if not totally caused by) plastic poisoning. It is absolutely not a given that we have time to solve this problem.

[scotty79]

I agree there are potential risks. So we shouldn't be mucking around with trying to recycle or burn it. Just set up a good system for storing it inertly under ground.

I wouldn't go as far as blaming plastic for any of our specific ailments because there are so many better candidates for primary cause in each case but I agree that the potential for some harm is there.

For example with obesity. Japanese don't suffer from it and they use heaps of single use plastics and eat a lot of marine based food that could accumulate microplastics. They just teach their kids to like broccoli instead of stuffing them with industrial grade corn syrup to shut them up.

[llamaimperative]

I'm pretty sure OP wasn't suggesting that we light it on fire or try to recycle it. They were suggesting that we use some of the materials that our biosphere has naturally figured out how to recycle whenever possible. I'd suggest that we increase the price of plastics to try to account for these externalities, similar to what we should do for HFCS (and sugar generally) per your comment.

Plastics' reproductive harm is very well established in marine life and early studies in mammalian life is pretty much in line with it. This stuff is almost certainly very bad, and we're using it for absolutely everything due to its rather fantastic properties and extremely low cost.

Agreed for obesity, there are more significant (and more addressable) causes -- but that's still quite far from "these are inert."

[lazide]

Or you just have no idea what you’re talking about, because you live in a nice cushy region.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year.

[https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/...

[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...]

[https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5.

[https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...]

All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more.

And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas.

Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’.

If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature.

Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.

[llamaimperative]

I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me.

First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!”

Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!”

Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.

[lazide]

Same to you, apparently.

Edit: oh, but you had to change your comment completely once you actually read things.

What a ridiculous person.

Swamps naturally breed malaria, among other diseases, similar to how dumps breed Rats. Swamps are where rivers and the like end up washing all the detritus. Malaria (estimated) has killed more humans than any other cause.

Living anywhere near a swamp is the natural equivalent of living near a dump burning tires constantly, but provably more lethal than the dump. Without massive effort to control the vector anyway.

Swamps are as natural as it gets.

How many hundreds of thousands of people are killed by plastic waste in dumps per year again? Zero? Except for maybe some rando who chokes on something?

And again, that is without discussing natural arsenic and uranium water contamination.

Oh, and I forgot about Radon [https://images.app.goo.gl/frMD3KoKXdssTgtM9].

We get worked up about human hazards because humans ‘should know better’, and are at least nominally within our control.

Nature just DGAF, and works at scales we can barely comprehend most of the time. And is often completely outside of our control. So apparently some people seem to think the hazards don’t exist or aren’t clearly far worse in many cases?

After all, how much man made radioactive gas do you need to check if you are breathing in at home?

And yes, all of this is very pertinent to the ‘kumbaya nature is self sustaining and all loving and takes care of everything’ comment.

Nature is, of that there is no question, at least. The rest is up for debate/interpretation. I love nature - but let’s not pretend it can be pretty stabby sometimes.

[SI_Rob]

my usual go-to here is to observe that cancer is 100% all-natural.

I have been tempted to put it on a T-shirt to be worn at gatherings where I might find myself in the company of people who celebrate or promote "natural" as if it were an axiomatic good.

In reality I could never bring myself to wear it in public out of concern for by-catch side effects: griefing random strangers for whom the miseries of cancer may form a very real part of their daily experience is not something I'd want to be associated with even if it was not the intended result.

[TeMPOraL]

Good point. And something similar occurred to me today: all that progress of science and relative safety of modern life made people stop feeling fear of the cosmos. Yes, Cthulhu isn't real - but cancer is. Along with millions other things that will maim or kill you in horrible ways, or just destroy your mind - all of which were here before us. The true cosmic horror, the dread of uncaring universe beyond our comprehension - it isn't out there, it's right here. It's called nature.

[llamaimperative]

Cancer is such a forgotten threat that solving it is probably the single most-funded endeavor in human history.

[llamaimperative]

Wow, that’s a great argument against some argument that’s not being made here.

[titzer]

Worldwide ocean plastic kills vast quantities of marine life. It's an enormous problem that affects entire ecosystems. Malaria is a complete red herring.

"you just have no idea what you’re talking about" is just plain rude. No one comes here for that, so you'll have to stop doing that to avoid being ignored.

[lazide]

So do red tides. Oxygen depletion zones. Population imbalances leading to mass die offs. Huge oil spills. Etc.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220695/#:~:text=Assumi...).]

which we have records of for all of recorded history (and fossil records of from far before that).

I’m not saying plastic is good to be dumping in the ocean. It isn’t! Oil spills are bad! Dumping massive quantities of fertilizer and making oxygen depleted zones worse is bad!

I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant. That claiming natural hazards don’t exist or aren’t often at least as or more of an hazard is ignorant. And leads to major mistakes on our side, if we think that.

And I wish I could be ignored. Arguing obvious stuff like this is exhausting, but apparently it needs to be done or the BS spreads even further - and causes real problems.

[TeMPOraL]

> I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant.

More than that. Nature balances itself through the massive die-offs. I'm not sure how people imagine this, that animals sit around round tables and negotiate a balanced use of resources? No, everything tries to murder and/or consume everything else, and the equilibrium of death is what we call "natural balance".

[llamaimperative]

Can you point out where anyone said “nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances?”

Are they in the thread with us now?

[llamaimperative]

Uhhhh people get worked up about human hazards because we’ve been producing a mass extinction event buddy. The Anthropocene has seen extinction rates 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate.

Let me know when the mosquitos and radon leaks catch up :)

Sorry to break it to you but you’re not the only person on HN who has heard of malaria or rotting swamps or uranium deposits.

As a side note, it’s telling that the only scoreboard you seem capable of using is which forces have killed more humans. I wonder if there are any other lenses through which one can understand the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[lazide]

You seem really confused as to what thread we’re in.

You know the one about ‘natural processes are all great, and digging a hole and dumping things in it is terrible’?

Which is why I’m pointing out that many natural processes kill a ton of people and animals? And why digging a hole and dumping things in it may not be so bad after all?

[llamaimperative]

OHHH duh that’s a good point. Things do die in nature. Sometimes at large scale and in horrific ways. Thanks!