The Native Americans Encountered by the Pilgrims: History Revealed

 James W. Loewen is a sociology professor who has spent a lot of time reviewing and comparing the various history textbooks that our high school students are required to read.  He first reported his findings in 1995 in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.  His work created a stir and he felt compelled to return in 2007 with a look at a new set of textbooks.  He returned again in 2018 with a version that acknowledges the Trump era in a new Preface, but otherwise the book was unchanged.  This book is a revelation.  One is left with the realization that, by design, we are taught little about our history.  Instead, a collaboration between textbook publishers, politicians, and everyday citizens provides our children with history books not intended to provide knowledge but to induce patriotism.  This topic was discussed in Politics and Teaching History: Brainwashing Students.

Part of Loewen’s intent was to illustrate how inaccurate our knowledge of our own history had become.  Perhaps the most disturbing chapter was the one in which he compared the actual history of our interaction with Native Americans with what we have been taught.  We tend to assume that our pilgrims came to settle an uncivilized land inhabited by “savages.”  What actually happened was that “settlers” were invaders into a land that had been occupied for tens of thousands of years, that possessed civilizations that would excite enlightenment philosophers with thoughts of ways they could improve their own European nations.  What would allow the invaders to overwhelm the natives was not their advanced civilization, but the diseases they carried into the Americas.  The crowded European cities were perfect places to develop and propagate infectious diseases; the wide-open spaces in the Americas were not.

“Some areas in the Americas did have high social density.  Incan roads connected towns from northern Ecuador to Chile.  Fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago the population of Cahokia, Illinois, numbered about forty thousand.  Trade linked the Great Lakes to Florida, the Rockies to what is now New England.  We are therefore not dealing with isolated bands of ‘primitive’ peoples.  Nonetheless, most of the Western Hemisphere lacked the social density found in much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.  And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were there sinkholes of sickness like London or Cairo, with raw sewage running in the streets.”

“The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region’s inhabitants.  Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest.  Squanto, ‘tried without success, to teach them to bathe,’ according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.”

The invaders found it easy to dominate a region when over 90 percent of the native population is killed by the diseases one has imported.

“Europeans were never able to ‘settle’ China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there.  The crucial role played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe only had about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.  The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to ‘settle’ the hemisphere.  For that, the plague was required.  Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.”

The plagues would begin with the Spaniards in the 1500s and continue over the centuries.  Europeans understood what was going on before the Pilgrims took off for America.  They assumed that it was God’s will that the natives die so that white Europeans could take over their land.

“How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City?  ‘When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city.’  When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them.  Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.”

“In 1617, just before the pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England.  For decades, English and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast.  After filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few American Indians to sell into slavery in Europe.  It is likely these fishermen transmitted some illness to the people they met.  The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison.”

“Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England.  Native societies lay devastated.  Only ‘the twentieth person is scarce left alive,’ wrote Robert Cushman, an English eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience.”

It is more inspirational to think of the Pilgrims having to deal with hostile savages and a challenging environment, than to document what actually occurred.

“…the Pilgrims hardly ‘started from scratch’ in a ‘wilderness.’  Throughout southern New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a parklilke environment.  After landing at Provincetown, the Pilgrims assembled a boat for exploring and began looking for their new home.  They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn and its useful harbor and ‘brook of fresh water.’  It was a lovely site for a town.  Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for ‘New Plimoth’ was none other than Squanto’s village of Patuxet.  The invaders followed a pattern: throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of Native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago.  Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.  (This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field.)  ‘Errand into the wilderness’ may have made a lively sermon title in 1650, a popular book title in 1950, and an archetypal textbook phrase in 2000, but it was never accurate.  The new settlers encountered no wilderness: ‘In this bay wherein we live,’ one colonist noted in 1622, ‘in former time hath lived about two thousand Indians’.”

Loewen was outraged that no treatment of the repeated epidemics existed in the textbooks covered in his first edition.  By the second edition, some textbooks merely noted that smallpox existed among the Natives.

The American Natives did not all die.  They would gradually increase their numbers and reconstitute their societies, but by then it was too late to stem the invaders’ tide.  But it was not too late to set an example of a life without the constant stresses of hierarchical societies and illustrate a form of liberty of which the European philosophers had barely managed to dream.

The American Natives had a history and cultures that deserve to be recognized and studied.  But if you are a white invader intending to eliminate them, it is best to have them recognized as savages who will not be missed.

 

Evolution by Cultural Selection, and Human Tribalism

 Carl Safina has written fascinating accounts of animals and how they live, communicate, and educate their offspring.  His latest book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, is full of interesting revelations.  One of the topics he discussed involved the creation of new species.  Scientists have long recognized that evolution can allow animals living in isolated regions where no mating is possible with other groups to follow different paths and develop different body features and differing cultures.  Safina was intrigued by examples of animals who shared a location yet still seemed to be evolving in different directions.

“The existence of hundreds of species of cichlid fishes in the same African lake has always seemed to me proof that some other process is functioning in the world.”

What Safina needed to find was some mechanism by which, in a given species, groups will choose to not interbreed even though they might intermingle.  His best example is the orcas who live in the Pacific Northwest.

“Think…for instance of the killer whale types who inhabit the same region but specialize in hunting prey in different ways—catching fish in one case, mammals in another—and have consequently developed social and physical differences.  Regardless of the fact that scientists haven’t named these whale groups separately (yet), they avoid each other and really have become separate species.”

Safina finds other examples of species in which cultural differences develop and lead to the tendency to avoid mating with those having different cultural attributes.  He arrives at this conclusion.

“I strongly suspect that the mechanisms driving the origin of new species are mainly three: Charles Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ and his ‘sexual selection,’ and the one our present exploration has brought us to here, which I’ll call cultural selection.  By cultural selection I mean the power of socially learned preferences to create group cohesion and cause avoidance between groups.  The avoidance means reproductive isolation.  The reproductive isolation sets groups up for different journeys.  Cultural learning can cause groups to mate like with like, thus deepening specializations, amplifying differences, and, I believe, diverging until they are sufficiently distinct to be different species.”

Safina’s ruminations about the evolution of animal species bring to mind a related dynamic that is operative in human societies, particularly with regard to political divides.  Political analysts continually refer to our development of quite different political cultures as tribalism.  We already separate ourselves into red and blue regions, minimizing contact with our political enemies.  We have even begun to avoid genetic mixing.  In previous generations, there did not seem to be much concern about the politics of whoever one’s child was marrying, but that has changed.  The Institute for Family Studies put out this note in 2020: Marriages Between Democrats and Republicans Are Extremely Rare.

“Marriage has always been a marker of both social solidarity and division in America. Marriages between people of different races were once prohibited, but they are now on the rise – one indication of growing solidarity across racial lines in America. Tolerance toward interfaith marriages has also grown over the years, and Americans are more likely to marry a spouse of a different religion now. But the same cannot be said for politics.”

The term “mixed marriage” in this context refers to marriage between an avowed independent with a party member.  Pundits have doubts about how many “independents” are truly independent rather than possessing a rigid voting pattern. 

“…it is possible to make a direct comparison between 2020 and 2017, the earliest year when the spouse’s party affiliation was available in the American Family Survey. My analysis suggests that in just three years, the share of politically-mixed marriages in the U.S. has declined from 23% to 21%, and the share of marriages between a Democrat and a Republican dropped from 4.5% to 3.6%.”

Using marriage as a simulant for mating and acculturation is not as reliable as it once was, but it is as good as any available.  These data suggest there is a component of genetic enhancement of particular attributes in isolated political cultures.  We usually think of evolution as a slow process taking place over long periods, but it can occur faster than one thinks.

In 1959, a group of Russian geneticists began what is known as The silver fox domestication experiment.

“Today the domesticated foxes at an experimental farm near the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia are inherently as calm as any lapdog. What’s more, they look eerily dog-like. All of this is the result of what is known as the silver fox, or farm fox, domestication study.”

“Starting from what amounted to a population of wild foxes, within six generations (6 years in these foxes, as they reproduce annually), selection for tameness, and tameness alone, produced a subset of foxes that licked the hand of experimenters, could be picked up and petted, whined when humans departed, and wagged their tails when humans approached. An astonishingly fast transformation. Early on, the tamest of the foxes made up a small proportion of the foxes in the experiment: today they make up the vast majority.

After six generations they had developed specimens with the behaviors of a different species; physical change to another species would take longer.  How much change occurred in one generation?  In two?  In three?  What generation of cultural isolation are we in…second?  How much has our political system changed in the last generation?  How much will it change in the next? 

We could be heading for World War III, or Civil War II, or both.

 

Centenarian Clusters: Don’t Trust the Data

 Reaching the age of 100 is a significant achievement.  Making it to 105 labels one a semi-supercentenarian, hitting 110 a full supercentenarian.  Such accomplishments have been rare enough that if a town or region where an unusual number of people reached these ages was discovered, it was a newsworthy event.  It became a common practice to analyze the lifestyles and living conditions in the area in order to suggest reasons why people there were living longer than expected.  Articles would appear suggesting the particular diet of the local population was responsible.  Other suggestions included a physically active life, strong social support systems, and even genetic isolation.  A recent note provided by The Economist indicates research provides a simple explanation: such clusters might not even exist.

The article, Places claiming to be centenarian hotspots may just have bad data, focuses on the research of Dr. Saul Newman of Oxford University.  It was noted that in 2010 Japan had audited its records and discovered that 230,000 supposed centenarians in their data base were actually dead or missing.  If the data on aged citizens in Japan was that incorrect, could bad data explain the anomalies?  Many centenarians today could have been born at a time when birth certification did not exist.  Today, we are constantly required to produce our birthdate and forgetting our age is almost impossible.  But if there was no birth certificate to refer to and no constant reminder provided, would we remember our age accurately after 100 years?  The data from Japan suggests that in some cases dead people might be kept alive for fraudulent purposes such as a continued arrival of pension checks.

Newman studied data available from the United States, Britain, Italy, France, and Japan.  His first observation was that regions with exceptional numbers of centenarians tended to be in the poorer regions of a nation, where record keeping might make one suspicious.

“Okinawa, for example, has a poverty rate nearly twice the Japanese average and 1.6 times as many listed centenarians for each reported nonagenarian.”

There were examples of contradictory data sets.

“In Italy provinces where more people reach the age of 105 tend to have more people die before 55. On the island of Sardinia, renowned for its abundance of very old people, residents have among the lowest chances of reaching midlife of any Italians.”

Places that were late in issuing birth certificates have also tended to have an excess in centenarians.

“The most concrete evidence that mistakes could be causing variations in the numbers of very old people came from America. Between 1841 and 1919, states introduced birth certificates, making age estimates more accurate and fraud more difficult. By aligning data on the numbers of old people in each state with the date that birth registration was introduced, Dr Newman found that it resulted in a 69% drop in the prevalence of supercentenarians.”

As with all things dealing with humans and health, simple correlations can be terribly misleading—perhaps, this one as well.

World War III: A Second Front is Opened; What Comes Next?

The alliances are set: the major democracies of the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea versus the major autocracies China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  The war began with Russia invading Ukraine.  A swift victory and the demonstration of NATO’s fecklessness would be outstanding and would give the green light to Russia’s allies to make aggressive moves in their own spheres of influence.  Easy victory did not happen, but neither did defeat.  Neither side has yet demonstrated the ability to defeat the other.  Russia is receiving warfighting assistance from China and Iran, and probably from North Korea as well.  Ukraine is receiving economic and military assistance from its allies, the alliance of major democracies.  Putin continues to gush confidence about the state of affairs in Ukraine even though his army seems unable to control any additional territory.  Could the autocrats have a plan B?

If NATO is an effective alliance, one not likely to collapse when threatened, it can still be enfeebled if the war in Ukraine saps its strength, both political and military.  The democratic alliance has admitted that political will in its nations is fragile, and military resources are being stretched thin by donations to Ukraine.  Putin could succeed by stretching out the war in hope that the alliance loses its will and allows him to win.  But what if your allies no longer trust you to do what you promised?  Could plan B include opening a second front to further test the endurance of the democratic alliance and to further deplete its military resources.  On October 7, the Hamas group executed a massive attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.  Hamas is supported by Iran who probably provided the arms necessary as well as other forms of support.

Iran has much to gain in its sphere of influence by damaging Israel and creating chaos in the Middle East.  Could China be watching and waiting for an opportunity for aggressive action that would go unopposed?  Is North Korea waiting for an opportune time to have another go at South Korea?

Putin has lately begun talking in ways that suggest something big is planned.  Consider this statement from a CNN article.

“’The Ukrainian crisis is not a territorial conflict, I want to emphasize this,’ he said at the Valdai forum. ‘Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest territory. We have no interests in terms of conquering any additional territories. We still have to explore and develop Siberia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East. This is not a territorial conflict or even the establishment of a regional geopolitical balance. The question is much broader and more fundamental: we are talking about the principles on which the new world order will be based’.”

Timothy Snyder has identified Vladimir Putin as a Christian fascist who believes that God is on fascism’s side.  He hates the western democracies because their lax morals and their insistence on personal freedoms weaken his Russian people—a rather Hitlerian concern.  The article’s author, Nathan Hodge, seems to agree.

“Putin casts that fight in existential terms, arguing this week that nothing less than a twilight struggle is underway to establish a new world order congenial to authoritarian states — and implying that Russia is in this for the long haul.”

Putin thinks he and his allies can win this war.

  

Waste, Recycling, and the Plastic Problem

Waste is a term that covers many materials.  There is what might be called household waste: the stuff we place in the garbage collection containers to be trucked away each week.  Then there are the body excretions to be disposed of and industrial wastes from unsold clothing to radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors.  Oliver Franklin-Wallis discusses them all in his book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.  Here, we will focus on the household stuff we throw away.

The method of disposing of unwanted objects has traditionally been to just dump them far enough away from where we resided so that we could forget about them.  As population density increased, a bit of planning became necessary.  Societies would establish formal dumpsites and control how much could be accumulated before a new site must be established.  The term landfill came to be used for planned dumpsites.  Large-scale accumulations of garbage initiate serious environmental problems.

“Today the solid waste industry contributes 5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire shipping and aviation industries combined.  As it decomposes, rubbish produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps many times more heat than carbon dioxide.  Landfills ooze leachate, a waste industry term for the noxious black or yellow sludge that forms from the putrefying rubbish.  Leachate is a noxious smoothie of every chemical and by-product you can imagine—acids, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and other poisons and carcinogens, which can leak down into the water table or into rivers, and into our water supply.”

Franklin-Wallis takes the reader to waste dumping gone insane in India at New Delhi.

“This is Ghazipur landfill, a mountain not of stone, but of garbage—14 million metric tons of it.  Piled 71 yards high and covering an area of 69 acres, it is the largest of three mega-landfills that ring Delhi.”

This dump site is actually an example of recycling as thousands of people try to make a living out of salvaging things from the mountain of garbage.

“Worldwide, 37 percent of our waste is landfilled, according to the World Bank; fully another third ends up in open dumpsites.  Waste management is expensive…whereas dumping costs virtually nothing, so, as the global population has boomed, mega-dumps like Ghazipur have proliferated.”

If one wishes to have modern, ecologically sound landfills, one can contain the waste in barriers that prohibit leakage of waste, but barriers don’t last forever, and this process only delays the inevitable poisoning of the environment.

Countries that can afford waste management add incineration and recycling to the menu of options, with each choosing its own mixture of options.  Some have found incineration attractive because it can be done in such a way that useful energy can be captured in so called “energy-from-waste” (EfW) sites.

“In the UK and Europe, at least, landfills are a dying business.  (The same is not true in the US or Australia, which send 50 percent and 30 percent of waste to landfill, respectively.)  In 1996, the UK government introduced a landfill tax, to encourage recycling rates…Anything that cannot be sent for recycling or composted is increasingly burned inside energy-from-waste (EfW) plants.”

“The reason for landfill’s decline is not, as was once feared, that we are running out of room for them (quite the contrary—empty land is easy to find).  Rather they have become obsolete, unable to compete with recycling and energy generation on cost, as well as politically unpopular.”

“In the UK, the percentage of waste that ends up burned has grown from 9 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in 2021—a 435 percent increase.  In the European Union, which burns just over a quarter of its trash, incinerators power 18 million homes.  Sweden burns roughly 50 percent of its waste, Japan 78 percent.  Denmark, which burns four-fifths of its household waste, has built so many EfW plants that the country now has to import 1 million metric tons of waste per year to keep them running effectively.  China, which has built more than 300 EfW plants since the 1990s, burns 580,000 metric tons of rubbish every day.”

Incineration seems a curious form of waste management progress when global warming is becoming a more urgent issue.  And burning garbage can emit all sorts of dangerous chemicals if not highly regulated.  Modern systems try to burn at a high enough temperature that dangerous compounds can be decomposed.  Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a clean energy source, and people who live near incinerators tend to have worse health problems than people who do not.

“Even so, incinerators’ emissions are substantial: in the UK, energy-from-waste plants have been found to emit more CO2-equivalent per kilowatt hour generated than coal power stations while regulators in New York found that even incinerators that comply with air quality legislation can release up to twice as much lead, four times as much cadmium, and up to fourteen times as much mercury as coal.”

The roughly third of waste that does not get deposited on land is divided between incineration and recycling.  Both options depend on companies being able to make money in the process.  Therefore, market forces will arise and the two modes will be in competition.  Recycling will be economically efficient for some materials and less so for others.  Plastics will be the major problem.

“The environmental benefits of recycling are manifold.  Recycling an aluminum can requires roughly 92 percent less energy and emits 90 percent less carbon than making one from virgin material; for every ton of aluminum saved, you’re also saving eight metric tons of bauxite ore from being mined from the ground.  Recycling one ton of steel requires just a quarter of the energy of mining it new, cuts the associated air pollution by 86 percent, and saves around 3.6 barrels of oil.  Recycled glass requires 30 percent less energy to produce, paper 40 percent less, copper 85 percent.  By recycling most materials, we’re not only reducing the greenhouse gases required in production, but the environmental damage caused by extraction: the logging, mining, processing, and transportation required in replacing the item with new.  Recycling creates less water and air pollution.”

“It is also better for the economy.  Globally, the recycling industry employs millions of people; the market for scrap metal alone is worth more than $280 billion.  Studies have shown that recycling schemes create 70 jobs for every one that would be created by landfill or incinerators.  And the scale is enormous: 630 million metric tons of steel scrap is recycled globally every year.  It’s estimated that 99 percent of the metal in scrapped cars, for example, ends up reused.  Of all the copper ever mined, 80 percent is still in circulation.  In the UK, three quarters of glass waste is recycled into new bottles, fiberglass, or other materials.”

The situation with plastic is quite different both economically and environmentally.  Plastics are so useful that production is huge and growing.

“More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20.000 every second…And that’s just one household item.  (It’s not even the most numerous.  That dubious honor goes to the four trillion plastic cigarette filters flicked to the ground and stamped out annually.”

Plastics are made from the residuals left from refining fossil fuels. Consequently, they are readily available and cheap to produce.  They were long marketed as having the advantage of being throwaway items.  However, they have severe health and environmental issues that are just now being recognized and studied. 

“When plastics are broken down, by ultraviolet radiation, by the elements, or by force, they do not disintegrate so much as divide, their chain-like structures splitting into smaller and smaller pieces of themselves.  Macroplastics become microplastics become nanoplastics.  By then they are small enough to enter our blood streams, our brains, the placentas of unborn children.  The impacts of these materials on our bodies are only just beginning to be understood; none are likely to be good.

Every time we drink from a plastic bottle, we are ingesting plastic particles.  Every time an infant is provided formula in a plastic bottle and sucks on a plastic nipple, it ingests plastic particles.  Every time we drive our cars, we cover the land and fill the air with plastic particles from the tires.  Every time we wash our plastic clothes, we emit enormous numbers of plastic fibers into our water systems.  There are so many plastic particles in our waterways that enjoying a sea breeze means you are inhaling plastic particles given off by the ocean water. 

Plastics have the curious tendency to attract other pollutants found in whatever medium they exist, including dangerous compounds and even pathogens.  Although drinking from a plastic container will send particles into your digestive system, they will get broken down into smaller particles in the process.  With each fracture, exposure to the chemicals in the plastic increases.  If the fractured particle is small enough it can enter into the blood stream. These things should be of concern, but they haven’t been until now.

“More than 10,000 additives can be used to make plastic, of which around 2,400 are potentially hazardous, according to EU safety standards, including plasticizers, flame retardants, dyes, lubricants, antistatic compounds, deodorizers and foaming agents.  The exact recipe depends on the base plastic being used and the purpose of the end product.  The plastics industry is notoriously secretive about these additives; a recent study found that more than 2,000 known plastic additives have been ‘hardly studied’ for their impacts on human health and are under-regulated in many parts of the world.”

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a commonly used plastic in making plastic bottles, for example.

“In 2021, scientists at Brunel University found that recycled PET leached 150 different chemicals into drinks—including toxicants such as antimony, BPA, and numerous endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) such as phthalates—at a greater rate than virgin PET.  Like all PET bottles, they also shed microplastics.” 

Endocrine disrupting chemicals are particularly dangerous because they resemble the hormones used by humans and other animals.  Thus, they can trick the body into responding to them when it shouldn’t, or generate a totally foreign response.  We cannot perform experiments on humans, but we can study the effects of exposure to such chemicals on other animals.  The results are frightening.

“The health impacts of this are, as yet, unclear.  However, human and animal studies have shown compelling links between phthalates, a common class of plasticizers, and lower fertility, developmental issues, obesity, and cancer.”

Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic.  It can be used, but it accumulates more impurities and damage every cycle.  Thus, it can be used only a few times and only along with a component of virgin material.  Unlike metals and paper products, there is no economic advantage to recycling plastics—they are always more expensive than virgin material.  The plastic industries were forced to take up the promotion of recycling by the force of public opinion.  Franklin-Wallis describes campaigns that were shams aimed mainly at avoiding any sort of regulation of their practices. 

“Over the years a kind of playbook emerged: plastics companies would make big promises about moving to more recycled content and even open new recycling facilities, only to abandon them when attention moved on.”

“In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola announced a goal to make its bottles from 25 percent recycled plastic, only to abandon the target four years later once consumer and political pressure had lifted.  In 2007, the company made headlines again when it set out to ‘recycle or reuse 100% of its plastic bottles in the U.S.’ and to achieve this, opened the ‘world’s largest PET recycling plant’ in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  In reality, the company missed its recycling target and quietly shut down the plant two years later.  Coke’s target of using 10 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2010?  Missed.  It set a target of 25 percent recycled content in its bottles by 2015 and failed to meet even half that.  They’re not alone.  PepsiCo and Nestlé, among others, have all previously failed to reach plastics recycling targets.  This is partly a failure of journalism: pledges get news coverage.  Few ever check later to see if they come true.”

Almost without realizing it, the world and the animals living on it have been inundated with plastic particulates and the chemicals of which they are comprised.  This cannot be healthy.  It could be an existential threat.  Evidence of health threats is not yet convincing, but the annual production of plastics will continue and accelerate.  Yearly production is expected to quadruple by 2050.  Recycling is not the answer.  The only apparent solution is to stop making plastics, but we have become so dependent upon them that this can not happen anytime soon.  We seem destined to follow this path until it is too late to respond, much like our experience with climate change.  Sigh….