Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When you think of plastic pollution, you might imagine ocean “garbage patches” swirling with tens of millions of plastic bottles and shopping bags. But unfolding alongside the “macroplastic” pollution crisis is another threat caused by much smaller particles: microplastics.
It seems to me we got swept up in the currents, now imperiling the world. Along the way, a lot of food made a lot of babies—packing the stadium for the great spectacle of collapse under the weight of the assembled crowd.
Whether we like it or not, we must live with the unknowability of the future, its capacity to humble us and take us by surprise, our inability to control it.
If you were to somehow instantly remove all the particles from ocean waters and sediments, they’d live on by transferring from gut to gut. Everything eats, everything gets eaten, and microplastics go along for the ride.
Complexity has strong links to energy which means that the combination of increasing energy costs and increasing complexity is a potential game changer. Even more so if the energy system also requires high levels of complexity such as nuclear power or a electric grid run on renewables.
Sankofa originates from the Akan inhabitants of Ghana, and broadly describes the importance of remembering and incorporating knowledge from the past in order to move forward. Or put another way, learning from the past in order to better steer the future.
Put up some solar panels, and add some plants that only need to be mowed once a year or so (sometimes with sheep) and you see an explosion of life.
As Boki’s forests disappear in plain sight, the deeper crisis is not deforestation alone – it is neglect. The world watches, largely indifferent, while the Banyinyi women’s struggle keeps echoing a painful truth: we do not lack solutions, we lack the courage to abandon the myths of progress that blind us to them.
The Open Source Seed Initiative, founded in 2012, has been a key vehicle and voice in reclaiming the right to share seeds and strengthening all the benefits that flow from seed-sharing: healthier soils, empowered farmers and communities, biodiversity, more robust seed innovation.
From resilience to resourcefulness, human ecology education offers the life skills our schools forgot—equipping the next generation to navigate adulthood, climate challenges, and complex social systems with confidence, care, and collective strength.
At the broadest level, Thompson, other scientists, and environmental advocates are supportive of measures to limit overall plastic production and ban the most problematic categories of plastic, both of which would indirectly reduce the generation of microplastics.
I warned in March that in response to the Trump administration’s trade war, China would likely resort to squeezing supply of critical materials it controls. Now it’s happening.
