37 Quotes by Alan Weisman

That’s the problem: Most people don’t know where money comes from, nor how it’s created.” Which, he believes, is the reason why our economy today resembles a chain letter based on the fiction of an infinite number of recipients, instead of a terrarium – such as Terra, the Earth itself.

Apart from stemming consumption, the most intractable puzzle that Paul Ehrlich has encountered is why health decisions about Mother Nature – the mother that gives us life and breath – are made by politicians, not by scientists who know how critical her condition is. “It’s the immoral equivalent of insurance company accountants making decisions about our personal health.” Even.

We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

The real reason that the world’s landfills weren’t overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill. After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore.

Back above ground, like robotic versions of the mosques and minarets that grace the shores of Istanbul’s Bosphorus, Houston’s petroscape of domed white tanks and silver fractioning towers spreads along the banks of its Ship Channel.

Plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any.

And should biologic time run out and some plastics remain, there is always geologic time. “The upheavals and pressure will change it into something else. Just like trees buried in bogs a long time ago – the geologic process, not biodegradation, changed them into oil and coal. Maybe high concentrations of plastics will turn into something like that. Eventually, they will change. Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.

The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments. “We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.

I’m so amazed,” he says, “by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. We have a lot to learn, obviously. But I haven’t given up on us.