There are elegant and inelegant ways our world can come to an end. The elegant ways are those that directly affect human civilization, while leaving the natural world unscathed. The inelegant ways are those that take down wild nature together with our own civilization.
Microplastics are accumulating in our soils. This starts out with big pieces of plastic people dump near cities, but over time, these big pieces of plastic are processed by nature into ever smaller pieces that get stuck in the soil. Those small pieces of microplastic interfere with plant growth and thus reduce agricultural yields.
Currently, estimates are that global yields are reduced by 5.5% by microplastics, translating to enough food for 780 million people. And it’s not getting any better. This is what our global plastic production currently looks like:
Here you have a graph of microplastics accumulated in British soils over time, you can see the exponential growth here too:
The closer you are to human civilization, the more microplastics you’re going to find in the soils. It makes perfect logical sense that this is harming plant growth. Low status white males love to insist that “CO2 is plant food”, but I don’t expect anyone is going to argue that microplastics are good for our crops. No, the only question we’re dealing with is: How badly are we screwing ourselves over here?
The 5.5% reduction in yields is just one estimate for the global impact, you can find studies where they’re looking at a more than 40% reduction in photosynthesis from microplastics in rice paddies. But I think what everyone can also agree on is that regardless of how bad the impact is today, it’s going to get worse. Those big pieces of plastic are inevitably going to turn into smaller parts, getting stuck in the soil, getting stuck in roots and causing all sorts of nastiness.
We have plans to stop using fossil fuels, but there’s not exactly any plans to stop producing plastics. In fact, have a look at this terrifying prediction of global plastics production:
And once you have these microplastics in your soil, you’re not getting rid of them in any human timeframe. After 22 years, they’re still stuck in the soil.
Estimates are that the microplastics concentration in the soil is exponentially growing by 4% a year. Let’s say harvests are currently reduced by 5% by microplastics and this grows steadily in line with microplastic concentrations.
That gives us the following numbers:
| 2025 | 2030 | 2035 | 2040 | 2045 | 2050 |
| -5% | -6.08% | -7.4% | -9% | -10.9% | -13.3% |
This is just my back of the envelope calculation, but it shows that we could eventually end up suffering famine, just from the microplastics building up in our soils alone.
In Europe, over the past 25 years agricultural yields have been stagnant. We’re no longer able to produce more food with the same amount of farmland. About a third of the problem is thought to be due to climate change, but the other two thirds are unexplained as of now. Some of the problem will be down to microplastics.
And you know what tends to follow stagnation? Decline.
Unless you enjoy eating plastic, get ready to go hungry.
There’s some nice stuff from Bangladesh where local get together and clean up FILTHY rivers and banks, and plant Miyawaki mini-forests.
Curry-munchers will end up killing all life on Earth.
Enjoy!
Read Rene Guenon’s book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. It’s an astonishingly prophetic book that predicts the rise of computers, plastics, cryptocurrencies, even apartments and DoorDash! That the heaviness of metal would be displaced by the lightness of plastics is perfectly in line with the fundamental thesis of the book. One sees this world with new eyes once one reads Guenon and understands what metaphysics truly is.
Sounds like an interesting book – thanks for the tip.
It is very difficult. It is not meant to be read casually or negligently. One sees that the whole of this material, scientific society was known of old. One sees the weakness of the whole thing. One sees that it is doomed.
Wretched! Wicked! Evil! and so on and so forth…
Hey Rintrah. In my files I found this quote from JM Smith, one of the bloggers at the Orthosphere, and it made me think of you:
“I long ago founded a minor academic journal devoted to environmental ethics, but eventually gave up the editorship because so many of the papers we published were profoundly misanthropic.”
So what would be the better approach? Praise for that species and ‘civilization’ which caused the greatest mass extinction in planetary history, and exterminated itself in a fury of greed and stupidity?
I often ask people if they have noticed that insects no longer swarm around lights at night, or besplatter windscreens as we drive. The most often answer is a slow ‘Yes’, then move on to something else, or complete indifference.
I live outside a city, semi-rural, but it’s the same here, and grows ever worse. Apparently neonicotinoids, that the poisons industry refuses to stop making, are ubiquitous in rainfall, and thus move everywhere. We have IRREVERSIBLY damaged all life-support systems, and our fate is sealed.
The MSM vermin are musing about how many 50 Celsius we will suffer in summers in the future, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, barring a miracle, it will soon be 55 degrees, then 60 ad infernum. Meanwhile the Murdoch cancers dismiss the longest, most widespread and most marked (hundreds of records a various places) heat-wave in recorded history with a sneering, ‘We call it summer’.
Climate change sucked all the air out of the room in the environmental movement. Maybe with good reason…attempted prevention of long-term catastrophes. But basic litter and basic toxins really got ignored. Everyone I know who wanted environmentalism to be a part of their career is 100% focused on climate change and carbon dioxide emissions. Plastics are interesting, because at first they are “inert” like carbon dioxide, but they are endocrine disrupters, they are plant growth interferers, and they are *persistent* in an awful way, being *more* harmful (and harder to avoid) the smaller they get. And of course they are related to fossil fuels, being in many cases petroleum based. Carbon reduction kinda got corporatized and governmentized. There are a lot more people making money talking about it than actually reducing it. But it remains the center of the action and the mental space, making up a huge % of environmental work and thought. And it’s a tough sell, because people like SUVs and flying and McMansions and big militaries. And ironically, the governments and global organizations involved with climate reduction have in many cases become enamored with AI and its need for huge increases in power production, so they… Read more »
Absolutely right. But let’s rephrase it as “Carbon dioxide sucked all the air out of the room in the environmental movement.” It’s funnier that way.
Heavy metals, microplastics, PFASs, bisphenols, phthalates, PCBs, dioxins, glyphosate and other pesticides, prescription drugs in drinking water, nuclear fuel ponds that will blow up if we run out of resources to cool them.
Environmentalists really blew their wad on global warming. They should have focused on pollution. Now nobody believes them.
Quite apart from the role of fossil fuels in climate change, I can kind of see the appeal in going after them to address all of the other issues on your list.
Fossil fuels are the master resource that unlocks all the others and in so doing enables every other disastrous activity to happen.
If consumption of fossil fuels could be reduced, then the consumption of everything else would also be reduced, so lots of industrial pollution would fall.
However, to be real, no effort was made to reduce consumption.
There was and is truth to the problems though and there is and was ‘unease’ to manage, so the system did its standard neat trick of coopting the rebels into the system, whereupon it turned their rebellious impulses towards its own ends – which is evermore profit accumulation, and so evermore consumption, and thus evermore pollution.
The green movement’s cred got destroyed into the bargain, plus it got them hated by denialists who need to protect the death denial stories they live inside to manage their own personal anxiety by attacking threats to those stories incessantly.
Anthropogenic climate destabilisation IS ‘pollution’, as are you. Creatures like YOU are why we will shortly go extinct.Nature will heal the planet in a few million years, and we’ll be a nassty memory, floating out into the cosmos through our electromagnetic radiation.
OK, but your brain is not full of a spoonful of plastic as breathlessly reported in the media. It’s not possible.
____________________________
“The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” coauthor of the letter Dušan Materić, from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, told the newspaper. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.”
In reality, Materić suggests that rising obesity rates could explain the trend.
“That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong,” he added, warning that there’s serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” over microplastics in tissues.”
https://www.insidehook.com/wellness/microplastics-studies
Yeah, I told you that in some comments. That’s total BS. Plastic in form of old fishing nets and something like this is more harmful to animals than “microplastic in human brains in the year 2070”. Rintrah is ranking the real problems in no good order.
That’s all gaslighting to hide the real problems, and Rintrah is part of this gaslighting. So be careful in what and whom you believe. Misinformation is more harmful for the human brain than microplastic or “spike proteins” ever can be.
Yeah!! Spike protein is GOOD! Had your twentieth mRNA booster yet-don’t wait!
RIVM advises against eating home-produced eggsThroughout the Netherlands, home-produced eggs can contain high levels of PFAS. This is shown by new research conducted at 60 different locations. RIVM therefore advises against eating home-produced eggs. In the Netherlands, we already consume a significant amount of PFAS through other foods and partly through drinking water. The amount people ingest through home-produced eggs comes on top of that. By not eating home-produced eggs, much higher PFAS intake can be avoided. Commercial eggs from shops or markets can still be eaten. RIVM issues general advice for the whole of the NetherlandsRIVM calculated how much PFAS people can ingest through home-produced eggs at 60 locations across the country. These amounts were compared to the health-based guidance value for PFAS. At 31 of these locations, people already exceed this value if they eat less than one egg per week. High concentrations of PFAS were also found at many other locations. Because PFAS intake from these eggs can be high, and the amount of PFAS cannot be seen from the outside of an egg, RIVM gives the general advice not to eat home-produced eggs. The research shows that the amount of PFAS in home-produced eggs can vary… Read more »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2OEugjfiw
Poor Dolly probably contains even more plastic than an actual doll:
I don’t know who this is.
Please don’t tell us you never heard of Dolly Parton. Anyway, I read that oatmeal and sauna are effective methods for helping to remove microplastics. Along with donating blood, as Rintrah mentioned in his microplastic article from last year. I remember @Retard wrote a hilarious comment on that article about semen stains on his wall. I can’t wait to read psycho Richard’s retarded comment about wind turbines that he will inevitably write later on. Almost as retarded as that time Big Bird linked to a schizo Substack article claiming that the Jews were using 5G to exterminate humanity. P.S. if Rintrah could extend the “recent comments” section to include more than 5 comments that would be great k thanks bye.
>Please don’t tell us you never heard of Dolly Parton.
I’m sorry LSWM Lives Matter I didn’t know her. I do now I guess.
>P.S. if Rintrah could extend the “recent comments” section to include more than 5 comments that would be great k thanks bye.
I turned it into 12 comments.
Thanks Rad for the daily doomer meal. I was hungry.
>Me eating my doomer meal.
The soil is being permanently infested with microplastics! Yay! I love the end of the world because I’m a loser! I hope I die and reincarnate as a King!
Anyway, maybe in the future we’ll just get all our food from aquaculture. Duckweed has a comparable protein quality to meat and it doubles in biomass every other day.
https://youtu.be/-UqTUHE7NFA
You could be eating this, my fellow low status white males. But instead you want to eat nothing but beef and processed sugar.
The world is being destroyed! Yay!
Meh this was a bad shitpost that deserved to be downvoted and I’ll strive to make better contributions to the blog from now-on. Sorry guys for making you suffer reading this!
Thanks for awaring me on duckweed. Will research
NP
Google says one-third of all food ends up in the trash.
Even with -13.3% until 2050 we still would produce more food than needed.
Rintrah loves it to see – in his fantasy – humans starving, being ill, getting dumber by “spike proteins” and microplastic, in the end dying in masses. He should seek professional help.
What happened in your early childhood, Rintrah, that you like to see all humans and nature being destroyed?
Plastic is chemically C, H, (O). Nature always finds a way to break down polymeres to its elements in the next 1000 years. With PFAS from windturbine rotors and electric vehicles you have to wait 100000 years. In those 100000 years it will cause cancer in every living being on this planet.
“Climate change” idiots don’t get that in their brain, that happens when you bad in science like mathematics, physics and chemistry. Dear kids: That happens when you don’t learn but sitting on the streets instead with signs like “skolstrejk för klimatet”. (Maybe it just happens when your mother drinks alcohol in the pregnancy and your are a little bit dumb in your brain.)
Even if Rintrah is openly misanthropic elsewhere, that still doesn’t address what’s happening here.
This response doesn’t engage with the argument about plastics, soils, or food systems at all. It skips straight to insults, projecting motives, and ridiculing others. That’s a classic terror-management reaction. When ecological overshoot threatens core stories about progress, control, and human exceptionalism, rational thought gets bypassed and anxiety erupts from the subconscious. That anxiety is then displaced into denial, moral outrage, and personal attack.
You can dislike Rintrah’s outlook and still recognize this isn’t a rebuttal – it’s a defence of a failing worldview under stress. If his posts were just trivial nonsense, they wouldn’t provoke this level of anger.
Most of us react defensively when deeply unsettling ideas land. The real question is whether one can be honest enough with oneself to turn that reaction into reflection – or whether it simply becomes more frothing vitriol.
The anthropogenic forcing of added atmospheric greenhouse gases eg CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and consequent increased water vapour, in the last 250 years, is the greatest and most rapid in all planetary history.By itself it would reduce the planet to Hades, but with deforestation, oceanic acidification and de-oxygenation, biodiversity loss, MASSIVE, UBIQUITOUS, chemical pollution, and the increased radiation burden after nuclear power stations melt down, probably destroying the ozone layer, we’ll be well and truly fucked, and SOON. You’re truly dumb, and arrogant with it, like a true Dunning-Krugerite.
Yeah, the fact people starve nowadays anyway is purely a matter of food distribution. Plus, there are many avenues we could pursue to feed people if people were less picky. As I noted in my stupid shitpost. Duckweed (Water Lentils) can be grown in water on a mass scale to feed people. It’s traditional fare in some Asian countries, and would be more effective at keeping people alive and healthy than feeding them grains or rice in the event that famine could be an issue.
I doubt we’re gonna be seeing mass famines in the west that can’t be offset by careful planning until we get to the point that society itself is under threat of collapse.
Still, the fact that soil polluted by microplastics doesn’t seem to recover is still a big deal. It’s sad that nature is being raped like that. I doubt most westerners will be really happy when foods we eat nowadays aren’t really practical to eat anymore because the soil just can’t sustain them anymore.
Soils are being sterilised by chemicals that kill the micro-organisms that ensure soil health.
You seem to be assuming relative climate stability. A poor assumption.