We Are Drowning In Plastic, and Fracking Companies Are Profiting

We are choking the planet in plastic. Everything from wasteful water bottles to grocery shopping bags are polluting our waterways, and endangering marine life and the natural environment. It’s fair to say that even the most casual news consumer has probably encountered a Facebook post, TV report, or radio segment about the garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean. 

Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the
 Thames Estuary on January 2, 2018 in Cliffe, Kent.

But what’s less well-known is what is fueling this plastics binge: fracking. As the Guardian recently reported, in less than a decade, tens of billions of dollars have been invested in creating new manufacturing sites around the world to turn fossil fuels into resin pellets used to manufacture plastic products. The companies profiting off this surge in plastics are contributing to a growing climate crisis while generating mountains of plastic garbage.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Wenonah Hauter - “We Are Drowning In Plastic, and Fracking Companies Are Profiting.”

Astonishing sense of prescience from Packard

Vance Packard demonstrated an astonishing sense of prescience when he wrote and published The Waster Makers in 1960.

Vance Packard's
 The Waste
Makers.

Packard, an American journalist, social critic, and author who died in 1996, wrote a lot about planned obsolescence, predicting with unerring accuracy the rise of powerful corporations and the unstinting consumerism, tied into the wasteful use of the world’s finite energy resources, and, beyond that a dilemma he probably sensed, but was without a name, climate change.

The Waste Makers is instructive reading for anyone eager to grasp a better understanding of how we have seemingly sleepwalked into climate change.

The late Vance Packard.

Actually Packard was not being intentionally clairvoyant, rather he simply exploring what existed and through that helping his reader’s sense that humanity’s frivolity, wasteful use of energy and the creation of a throw away world was creating generations of “waste makers”.

Those keen the better understand the dynamics that now trouble the world would be well advised to read and consider what Packard had to say.

Beneath the Wisteria supporter, Lou Cook, is something of a Vance Packard enthusiast and would be, I'm sure, to discuss with anyone ideas about Parkard's thoughts.