There have been a few times in our history that we have completely transformed our understanding of the basic, fundamental question, what is our place in the universe?
—Jason Kalirai, Astrophysicist
An old cosmic quest is rising up, these days, to the surface of oceans, atmosphere, human awareness and junk piles!
That stumper? Where to put stuff.
Back-up hard drives, old equipment, old paint and piles of polystyrene your local system can’t recycle?
Those are but small taters in our big old mash of global, where-to-put-it confusion today. What’s the right place for garbage, toxic fracking discharge, nuclear waste, leaking coal ash and rubble from blasting off entire Appalachian mountaintops?
And what is the place of people – of life itself – among our values?
Increasing crowds of human migrants are now displaced by war, drought, unchecked deforestation and mining – along with a mass exodus of entire species, whose former habitats we’ve shriven of life. Do these valuable residents have no place on the planet?
Such questions only look new. They’re ancient. Understanding the place of things, in fact the entire order – the “Way” of the cosmos – was once considered the place, the very purpose, of humankind. The Greeks called it “teleology.”
After the Industrial Revolution, teleology got relegated to religion and fables. The real world existed to produce money, so it seemed best just to take or toss things where expedient.
Centuries of this expedience have left our world in a chaos that confuses us today. Sea-rise, desertification, acid fallout, beached whales, invasive plants, weird blights, southern blizzards – nothing seems in place.
Thus the ancient question is again poking us out of a stupor. Where do things rightfully belong: this effluent, those exotic plants, these bee-killing pesticides, that toxic detergent? And what is my personal place in addressing the whole mess?
Disturbing as it is, this question of “place” is forcing our species to grow up, even if the long-accumulated problem pile makes us wonder if we’re in regression.
Consider the massive global problem of waste.
In E.B. White’s 1945 classic, mouse-hero “Stuart Little” lands in a New York garbage truck, which he reckons will be his last ride. Why?
“He knew,” wrote White, “that the garbage would be towed twenty miles out and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean.”
Dump trash in the ocean? That scenario would astonish a New York kid today, seven decades later. Not only is city garbage no longer aimed seaward; the city plans to stop generating it altogether with its goal of “zero waste” (or 90 percent reduction) by 2030.
“This is the way of the future if we’re going to save our Earth,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said, implying that it’s a New Yorker’s place to care.
Meanwhile, marine conservation groups are placing our attention on newer sources of sea trash, with a study released this year finding more than 8 million metric tons of plastic alone – annually – flowing into oceans.
Another study, in 2013, found harmful plastics chemicals, along with the toxins that plastic absorbs, ending up in wrong places – like the guts of seabirds and fish.
Plastic flows—as cup tops, bags, straws and countless other items—out of parking lots and streets, down storm drains and rivers, into the sea. And from millions of household sinks flow plastic microbeads from soap and cosmetics.
The whole tonnage brings home the reality that nothing, on a fluid earth that is meant to flow, stays in one place.
The Trash Free Seas Alliance, whose membership includes industry stakeholders like Nestle Water NA, Coco-Cola and Dow Chemical, is thus working with marine scientists to reduce the plastics flow at the source.
But we too are the source. Ocean watch groups and the organizers of World Oceans Day (June 8) are asking us to forgo that plastic straw, cup top, grocery sack and microbead soap.
Does one microbead matter?
Well, does one planet?
Recently the Science, Space and Technology Committee, in the House, advanced a bill to cut NASA’s Earth science funding. It directed the agency’s entire focus to “space” – which apparently excludes this one particular planet.
It’s not certain where the bill is supposed to take humans except “back,” as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden put it, expressing dismay at this effort toward willed oblivion of our own place in the cosmos.
But one thing looks clear. If our goal is not to understand that place, no distant worlds can bring home to us the knowledge we seek.
Liza Field is a teacher and conservationist in southwest Virginia
