It’s hard to figure out what’s worse: the collapse of the common understanding of how adherence to the U.S. Constitution defines our nation or the collapse of our common understanding of what it’s going take for mankind, as a species, to survive on our dying planet. It’s the classic Hobson’s Choice: both bad.

A recent article (November 2023) in the Washington Post discussed our use and abuse of plastics, the once-miracle material that now threatens to destroy everything. http://tinyurl.com/45cbc7xm  Here are a few mind-numbing facts assembled by Journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, author of “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have” and the newsletter “News From a Changing Planet:”

Between 1950 and 2021, humanity produced about 11 billion metric tons of virgin plastic — that’s the weight of 110,000 U.S. aircraft carriers. Only about 2 billion tons of this is still in use. The rest — some 8.7 billion tons — is waste: 71 percent has ended up in landfills or somewhere else in the environment, including the ocean; 12 percent has been recycled; 17 percent has been incinerated. At the rate we’re going, global plastic waste will rise 60 percent by 2050.

As things stand, from 2010 to 2050 alone, the world could generate enough to cover all of Manhattan with a pile of plastic more than two miles high.

Microplastics have been found in breast milk and in our blood. Around the world, up to 60 percent of all recycled plastic is collected by waste pickers, often members of poor and marginalized communities, who suffer from inhaling caustic fumes from burning plastic and drinking water heavily contaminated with microplastics.

The author strikes a note of optimism by citing a 175-country agreement in 2022 to “develop a legally binding international treaty to end plastic pollution by 2040.” This is the classic “agreement to agree” scenario, if we can. The author maintains that a combination of a mere nine policies “could reduce annual plastic waste by more than 87 percent.”

I will spare you the agonizing details of what’s possible and let you read for yourself. Then you can decide whether you think any of this will happen. Just note this:

U.N. negotiators just finished meeting again in Nairobi to begin crafting the actual treaty, in hopes of completing it by the end of next year [2024], though progress seems to have stalled, a result of excessive influence from oil and gas industry lobbyists, according to nongovernmental organizations. [emphasis added]

Those folks will no doubt be joined by the likes of Amazon and, in the DC area, Giant Foods, whose packaging practices have zero apparent regard for the efficient use of cardboard and plastic packing materials. As the world’s number-one plastic polluter, we should be able to count on U.S. leadership in this effort to save the planet, but don’t count on it.

It will take, I suggest, a massive public uprising to compel industry to pay attention to this existential threat to the survival of our species. Given everything else going on in American politics right now, such an uprising seems a pure fantasy.

One thing seems certain, when the end comes, it won’t be pretty. The worst dystopian stories you’ve ever read will seem like child’s play. We almost at the irrevocable tipping point on climate change, so add the destruction of the oceans and all the rest and you can begin to imagine what will happen. This is not a movie, and there will be no miraculous “save” just before the end.