There's no escaping microplastics.
 | By Max Strasser Sunday Opinion Editor |
I started noticing it when I moved back to New York last fall. At dinner parties and in work meetings and conversations with friends, it was offered as an answer to any number of questions: Why are so many of my pregnant friends having boys instead of girls? Why can't you remember that article that you read just yesterday? What explains the proliferation of — to put it delicately — digestive issues? Microplastics. |
It was a punchline, mostly. But like all jokes, it revealed something deeper: There is a widespread anxiety not just about the microscopic bits of plastic that can now be found everywhere, but also about what we humans are doing to our environment and, consequently, to ourselves. |
When I started looking into the science on microplastics — with the help of a couple of my much more scientifically literate colleagues — I found that the facts were, at best, ambiguous. Yes, microplastics are everywhere. No, we don't actually know what that means for our health — much less our short-term memories. My head began to spin with environmental and existential angst; I realized I needed someone smarter than I am to make sense of this topic. So I turned to Mark O'Connell, one of my favorite writers working today and someone who is very familiar with environmental and existential angst. (I can't recommend his book "Notes From an Apocalypse" enough.) |
In his guest essay, which is also the cover of this week's Sunday Opinion section, O'Connell takes on the question of microplastics. In a wide-ranging piece, he covers everything from how microplastics have been found in 75 percent of breast milk in Italy to what Joe Rogan fears they are doing to our babies and why they are a perfect locus for anxiety in a world of TikTok scrolls. Knowing that there are microplastics all around us "registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has the feel of a backhanded divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate," O'Connell writes. "Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage." I'll be honest: This essay hasn't made me much less worried, but it has helped me to understand why I feel the way I do. I hope you have the same experience. |
What Our Readers Are Saying |
At the heart of this is our diminishing capacity for self-determination and self-preservation. Avoiding violence used to mean staying away from the bad part of town. Now a bullet can find you anywhere. You cannot choose to avoid plastics entering your body no matter what decisions you make for your own health or the planet's; plastics will be in your bloodstream. Statistical likelihoods of harm or death aren't the issue; powerlessness is. — Mark, Montpelier, Vt. Plastics are to the American empire what lead was to the Roman Empire — substances both made for a prolific society while slowly poisoning it. The comparison eventually falls flat, however, as the Romans lacked the technology and knowledge to understand what was happening. We know what is happening to us and yet we will never make any significant correction. Would the people of that time taken steps had they understood the threat? — Mhevey, Maryland What if, as a country, we decided to change. Who would be in? Could we get team work out of the U.S.A.? Start by ridding your kitchen of plastics. Next, don't buy anything new that is plastic. Products sold in plastics get passed up. Orange juice can be bought in a plastic container or a paper carton. We have choices. Choose to not have plastics around. — Therese Stellato, Crest Hill, Ill. |
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