Just one word: Plastics

We never were told by Mr. McGuire in The Graduate just what we were facing with his one word future, but now fourty years later, we have a little better idea…

In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified.  Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom.  The real problem was “our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology.”

Moby-Duck or The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood, by Donovan Hohn, Harpers, January 2007, pg. 61

And…

What’s most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something—anything—could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last.  By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, and economy of forgetting.

ibid.