Foresight

"Think It Through..."

There is an amusing story about Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976. Asked by a Westerner about the consequences of the French Revolution (1789-90), he is said to have replied, “Too early to tell”. It’s been suggested that Mr Zhou misunderstood, thinking the question referred to the student riots of 1968; but that seems unlikely for such a sophisticated and learned man.

Even if the story is not true, it ought to be.

There is something attractive about such a long view of history; it lends badly-needed perspective. Human beings, as a rule, are all too often rushing to accomplish their short-terms goals – to the detriment of mature consideration and evaluation. There is much to be said for the Chinese saying expressed, for instance, by Lin Yutang: “Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise”. Unaccountably, the author of Ecclesiastes omitted the line, “A time to labour, and a time to think it through”.

For anyone who has seen “The Graduate”, the following dialogue should have acquired a distinctly sour flavour.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Much to his credit, young Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) thinks about it for a second or two, and then forgets about it permanently. If only others had done likewise…

Among the many and varied types of pollution that ambitious business people have inflicted on our world and its biosphere, plastics have become newsworthy of late. Apparently there is a downside to materials that are cheap, versatile, and very, very durable. Who could possibly have foreseen that? Certainly no one who was interested solely in getting to market fustest with the mostest (to appropriate Nathan Bedford Forrest’s engaging words). It seems probable that the fictional Mr McGuire would be dead by now, along with many of those responsible for filling up our environment – the only one we have – with plastics that will outlive them by centuries, if not millennia, if not epochs or aeons.

As of today, it’s estimated that over 9.2 billion metric tons of plastic have been manufactured – just over 1 ton for every person currently alive. The production rate is currently running at over 450 million tons a year. And when we no longer need or want something made of plastic – why, we just get rid of it. It’s so convenient. What could be simpler? The trouble is that plastic is far from being a wasting asset. On the contrary, it is all too permanent. It may change shape or form, but it hangs around all the same.

In school, long ago, I learned about the various types of rocks. Igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Well, now there is a fourth type: plastiglomerate, formed usually when plastic refuse is heated by artificial or natural means. This charming stuff can be conjured up, for instance, if plastic rubbish is thrown into a bonfire or an industrial incinerator – or even by volcanic action on the seabed. And so far, it looks as if it is just about as durable as any other kind of rock.

By now almost everyone must be aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, floating somewhere between Hawaii and California. According to The Ocean Cleanup,

“It is estimated that 1.15 to 2.41 million tonnes of plastic are entering the ocean each year from rivers. More than half of this plastic is less dense than the water, meaning that it will not sink once it encounters the sea… Once these plastics enter the gyre, they are unlikely to leave the area until they degrade into smaller microplastics under the effects of sun, waves and marine life”.

The term “microplastic” typically means fragments 5 millimeters or smaller; particles smaller than 1 micrometer (1,000 nanometers, or 0.001 mm) are generally called “nanoplastics”. But it’s all plastic.

And, as we shall see, those microplastics and nanoplastics eventually get everywhere. Including inside your liver, kidneys, veins, arteries, and brain. Yes, evolution equipped us with the blood-brain barrier to protect our most sensitive and valuable tissues – but evolution is no match for Mr McGuire. Microplastics are also found in placental tissue – so unborn babies get their fair share.

The Guardian reports that “Researchers at the Pic du Midi Observatory found airborne microplastics in samples every week between June and October 2017”. That’s a cool 2,877 metres above sea level, in the Pyrenees. Over 9,400 feet up in the sky.

OK, so there are microplastics everywhere – including inside us. But that doesn’t mean they do us any harm, does it? Unfortunately that turns out not to be the case at all. A study from South Korea published in 2023 states unequivocally:

“In vitro experiments with human cells and in vivo data generated with mice showed that microplastics elicit adverse health effects mainly by causing inflammation, oxidative stress [increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production], lipid metabolism disturbances, gut microbiota dysbiosis, and neurotoxicity”.

But surely recycling takes care of most of our unwanted plastic – doesn’t it? Not so much. In fact, really not at all. According to a Greenpeace report published in 2022, the amount of plastic recycled in the USA is as low as 5-6%. The UK does better – or does it? According to Greenpeace and the pressure group Everyday Plastic, 58% of all plastic waste in the UK is incinerated, 14% is exported to other countries and 11% is sent to landfill. Just 17% is actually recycled. And what becomes of all that plastic that is incinerated? The Law of Conservation of Mass assures us that the combustion products must go somewhere. As well as greenhouse gases, these include dioxins and furans—cancer-causing chemicals that you do not want in the air you breathe.

Greenpeace concluded that recycling is impractical, expensive and toxic, and that most of the plastic that people painstakingly put in their recycle bins winds up in landfill. If that is true in the world’s wealthiest nation, what can the situation be like in poorer countries? According to Environmental Health News, “Two-thirds of all plastic ever produced remains in the environment”. That would be about 6 billion tons.

There are about 40,000 different types of plastic polymers, which cannot be melted together for recycling. Broadly speaking, each type has to be processed separately; and even then recycling is difficult, expensive, and dangerous. Workers are exposed to toxic chemicals and microplastics which get into the air – and everything else – and are discharged into the environment.

“In addition to the chemical byproducts in producing or incinerating plastic, there are harmful additives, such as bisphenol-A (BPA), metals such as cadmium or lead, flame retardants, perfluorinated substances (PFAS), phthalates, and other chemicals. Many of these are known endocrine disrupting compounds that alter our hormones, and have been linked to a variety of health impacts including cancers, heart problems, obesity and diabetes, birth defects, and impacts to the reproductive, immune and nervous systems”.

Just making new plastic is cheaper, easier, and far less complicated and risky. So that’s what is generally done. After all, consumers, governments, and industry like “cheap” and have mastered the fine art of not thinking about nasty things.

The generic name PFAS embraces a huge family of chemicals that exploit extremely strong bonds between carbon and fluorine atoms, which can result in very strong and durable materials. The best-known example is Polytetrafluoroethylene – PTFE to its friends (trade name Teflon).

On 17^th January 2025, the Guardian headlined “Revealed: drinking water sources in England polluted with forever chemicals… Water industry calls for PFAS ban after analysis of sampling data shows contamination across country”. Why this sudden concern? “There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years,” says Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University. For one well-known substance, the “cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)”, water guideline values have declined by 37.5 million times in the US. “Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink”.

Accordingly, ‘The European Commission intends to propose a ban on the use of PFAS, or "forever chemicals", in consumer products, with exemptions for essential industrial uses… EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told Reuters in an interview’. Naturally, the PFAS industry is lobbying against any such legislation; and so far the UK government has announced no plans to follow the EU’s (theoretical) example. The defence, as usual, is “We had no way of knowing… nobody told us… we acted in good faith… All we wanted was to make money”. (I made the last bit up).

Residents of the island of Jersey are being advised to consider bloodletting (seriously) as a way of getting accumulated PFAS out of their bodies. For years, it turns out, drinking water supplies were polluted by the frequent and lavish use of firefighting foams containing PFAS at the airport. Astonishingly, Jersey’s government signed a confidential deal with 3M, the manufacturer, as long ago as 2005, which not only lets 3M completely off the hook for any compensation but actually commits the government to helping it in any future legal claims. It seems that Jersey even needs 3M’s permission to conduct blood tests as a means of screening for PFAS. Perhaps it’s true that some corporate lawyers practice black magic!

And there lies the heart of the problem: products such as the more than 10,000 types of PFAS in use are recklessly employed long before any proper understanding of their dangers is reached. What kind of excuse is it to say, “Oh, we didn’t know how dangerous they were, so we just went ahead anyway”? Not so much any kind of “Precautionary Principle” as the good ol’ “What – Me Worry? Principle”.

In marked contrast to this type of recklessness, the science fiction author Larry Niven consistently attributes certain traits to his Belters (people who live and work in and around the Asteroid Belt); they are neat, conscientious, and safety-aware in the extreme. SF writers often stress that anyone who lives in an environment surrounded by vacuum will be either obsessively careful or dead in short order. (The same applies to people living under the sea).

Niven’s characters often advise others to “Think it through”. This is particularly advisable for anyone whose ideas tend to be dominated by comforting narratives, rather than hard, unyielding facts and figures.

For those who live in a more forgiving environment, such as the surface of the planet where humans evolved, there may be reasons other than stupidity or laziness for taking a short-term view. One of the most powerful has always been religion: “God will provide”. (To which someone retorted, “But you won’t like what He provides”). Another is pragmatism: corporations notoriously look one quarter ahead at most, because they are evaluated by their quarterly numbers.

The great economist Michael Hudson emphasises that everything in the USA is short-run. In the short run, he says, the USA always wins, but the long run is another matter. The US strategy depends on making sure everyone goes on thinking short-term, which leads to chaos. In 1950 the USA had 80% of the world’s gold, complete freedom of action, control of the IMF and World Bank – even the UN – and huge natural resources of its own. Yet today, through policies of resolute and principled selfishness, it has hit the skids. Human beings did not evolve to be individually selfish, but to cooperate. Exceptionalism is ultimately self-defeating.

Even the carefully engineered Ukraine and Syrian wars are of questionable value to the West; the contemplated war against China would be utterly disastrous. They haven’t thought it through.

The current Los Angeles wildfires have been very destructive, claiming at least 27 lives. J. P. Morgan has estimated the insured losses from the fires at more than $20 billion. Of course recriminations are flying around like white-hot sparks, but it seems clear that almost everyone was remiss in underestimating the risks and the precautions needed to deal with them. It’s always the same: when a danger has not manifested itself for long enough, people begin to act as if it had gone away forever. When in fact the intelligent response would be to expect it soon. Human colonisation did not necessarily tip the balance against sustainability in the area; the Native Americans managed rather well for thousands of years. But when the European colonists flooded in and started building houses, factories, skyscrapers, shops, and roads everywhere, they severely distorted the ecology and may have placed too great a stress on it. Although it’s a touchy subject, there can be no doubt that Californians have been using too much of the state’s limited fresh water; aquifers are getting low, and in the foreseeable future some may dry up altogether.

According to Earth Overshoot, the USA is at “Sustainability Grade D” (“Below Average”) with about 355 million inhabitants while it could sustainably support no more than 167 million. The Global Footprint Network is broadly in agreement.

Almost all the really serious problems we face are either caused or exacerbated by overpopulation. However there is a consensus among political and business elites that this fundamental issue should never be given its due importance or even admitted to. We are told that there is plenty of room; just look at all those open fields and hillsides! That there are simply too many people on Earth is “an inconvenient truth”, if only because so far no one has come up with a politically correct and feasible way of dealing with it. Obviously, when a politician comes up against a problem that he doesn’t know how to solve, the first thing he does – as a matter of urgency – is to claim that it doesn’t exist. The tried and tested “ostrich policy”.

Jon Austen explained this basic fact in simple language two years ago.

“Eight billion people alive today is a milestone in human history. We accept this figure as though it is normal: a minor news story, nothing to worry about. But it is the most dangerous place we’ve been in the history of civilization. In only eleven years, one billion people have been added to our numbers; a number that’s still rising, and not set to peak before the end of the century. Eight billion people on the planet. It is unprecedented and unsustainable. Unsustainable, meaning logically that it will fall. But how and when it will fall is not discussed as it means facing an inconvenient truth”.

Politicians do not rise to the top or stay there by drawing attention to inconvenient truths, still less by trying to do something about them. We are all passengers on a bus that is heading straight for a cliff edge, driven by a bunch of lunatics and blind men. Once we go over the edge and find ourselves in free fall, it’s a safe bet they will say, “Well, could you do any better? Go on – you take the wheel!”

Five years ago, Kevin Casey hit the nail on the head.

“Climate change is not the biggest threat to the world’s environment – we are. The world’s rivers and seas aren’t choked with floating piles of rubbish, toxic chemicals and plastic waste because of climate change. They’re that way because we have 7.7 billion people crammed onto a planet that’s dying under the pressure of our greedy, selfish abuse. Two decades from now, the earth’s oceans are on target to contain more plastic in them (by weight) than fish. Climate change didn’t do that. Way too many people did that”.

No one in power likes to mention overpopulation - the T. Rex in the room - because they don’t have a plan to deal with it. Ordinary citizens don’t like to hear about it, either – understandably enough. And they at least have the excuse that “if it were a problem, our leaders would have told us”. (Poor deluded fools). Yet the consequences go on piling up: pollution, resource shortages, disease, war, and plain overcrowding. The only slight disagreement I have with Mr Casey is that he writes, “In hindsight, we should have addressed rampant overpopulation shortly after WW2, when the global population was still around 2.5 billion…” In my humble opinion, about 1900 would have been a better time.

Yet another way in which humans can benefit from foresight is to learn from the experience of others – even other species. Consider, for example, the alarming implications of John B. Calhoun’s attempts to construct a “rodent utopia” in 1947.

‘Using a variety of strains of rats and mice, he… provided his populations with food, bedding, and shelter. With no predators and with exposure to disease kept at a minimum, Calhoun described his experimental universes as “rat utopia,” “mouse paradise.” With all their visible needs met, the animals bred rapidly. The only restriction Calhoun imposed on his population was of space – and as the population grew, this became increasingly problematic.

‘Dominant males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount any rat they encountered. Mothers neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. In certain sections of the pens, infant mortality rose as high as 96%, the dead cannibalized by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a physical sense but at an immense psychological cost. They were the majority in the late phases of growth, existing as a vacant, huddled mass in the centre of the pens. Unable to breed, the population plummeted and did not recover’.

Does that behaviour remind you of anything you have seen (or read about) lately? Granted that adults are not eating children – yet – the rest sounds like a description of what goes on in our worst city centres. Some of us subordinate animals have withdrawn quite a long way already, and who knows what would have become of us were it not for the Internet and other such technology? (Although the refuge of one’s study and computer may lead us, in the end, to the equally dire fate of E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”).

Contemplation of Calhoun’s rats brings us to Donald Trump, who certainly likes to behave like a super-dominant alpha rat. Recently he observed blandly that only 40,000 or so people live in Greenland and that he would be willing to give each of them $1m (of U.S. Taxpayers’ money) to buy their votes. In return the USA would get untold natural resources. (Rather drolly, one Danish MP suggested appealing to Russia for protection!) Canada is in a similar position. When resource hunger becomes powerful enough, no laws or agreements mean anything. Dr Hudson remarks that, especially in drought-stricken regions such as Panama, water is becoming more valuable than oil.

“You can see that Trump is looking for choke points. A choke point is, as we said, trade with the United States, that’s a choke point that can be turned off with tariffs, whether it’s Canada or the EU, canal and transportation, that’s a choke point. Energy, oil and gas, that’s a choke point, which America [has] solved by its actions in Syria, Iraq, all throughout the Near East”.

Up till recently, population could be left to take care of itself because there were still “underpopulated” areas – thanks mostly to hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders who spread themselves very thin. Ironically, future generations may thank the USSR for having preserved some wilderness and natural resources, which weren’t plundered the way North America’s were – largely because the USSR did not attract hordes of immigrants. Today there is precious little space left for expansion, or even for emergency evacuation. The Rev Dr Malthus was dead right: given time, exponential increase will always overtake linear increase.

H. Sapiens may have been near to extinction 60,000 years ago, and came through probably by sheer dumb luck. If the worst came to the worst, we could easily afford to slim down to a few million again – increasing population is the easiest and most natural thing in the world (and great fun, too). The question to ask of people who worry about shrinking population is “why?” Two of the main reasons for wanting a growing population (or copious immigration) have traditionally been to provide a pool of unemployed labour, driving down wages; and to provide cannon fodder. Neither is very creditable – or, nowadays, necessary.

Statesmen should have been thinking hard about tapering off population by 1900 at the latest, instead of presiding over a century of viciously destructive wars, mostly to shore up their weak egos. Now they are complaining about low birth rates and “demographic crises”, when actually Russia is right in the sweet spot (thanks to its vast almost unpopulated areas). The UK is 4.5 times overpopulated – and reacting by inviting in as many new inhabitants as possible while slashing domestic food production. (It now imports well over half its food).

It boils down to a question of individual decision-making versus community or species decision-making. So far there is absolutely no one making decisions for our species as a whole, or even gathering data impartially to support such decisions. Why is this? Well, hardly anyone has any motivation to act altruistically. At best, a few act in the interests of their nation, race, religion, etc.

At the moment, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar provide at best something like half of the UK’s electricity needs. No matter how many windmills and solar farms are built, they won’t generate much more electricity than that when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. (And at worst, they manage a pitiful 10% or less of what is needed: “Between Thursday and Saturday, 55% of electricity came from gas and just 11% from wind and solar. The output from Britain’s nuclear reactors hummed along at 4.7GW, but at 10% of total output it only touches the sides of Britain’s baseload thirst”).

There is, however, a possible answer: reduce the population by more than half. For the benefit of those arrogant dogmatists who can’t stand the sight of “Malthusianism”, that doesn’t mean shooting or poisoning two out of every three people. For the UK it would have to be done gradually, by ending immigration and repatriating people who have come in recently. Then, if the birth rate remains lower than the death rate, nature can take its course. Other nations could choose policies that suit their particular circumstances.

The legends of Midas and Tithonus demonstrate that the ancient Greeks clearly understood the necessity of foresight and, failing that, a reasonable modesty. They have marked resonance today, when one continually sees examples of hubris, impulsiveness, and failure to think things through.

In his “juvenile” SF novel “Time for the Stars” (1956), Robert A. Heinlein proposed a “Long Range Foundation” with just one fundamental principle.

“It wasn’t enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more [over $11 billion in 2025’s devalued dollars] and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever…”

With perhaps a touch of technologist’s over-optimism – after all, it was science fiction and the LRF was important for the book’s plot – Heinlein depicts the LRF as desperately struggling to get rid of all the money that piles up as its disinterested projects persist in raking in huge profits. The idea behind it is interesting: that the best investments ever made have been in fundamental research that looked quite useless in practical terms. The work of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and others in basic physics. Euclid, Archimedes and others who laid the foundations of mathematics. Darwin’s theory of evolution, complemented by Mendel’s humble but critical work breeding pea plants. Faraday’s experiments with electricity and Maxwell’s equations explaining them. Turing’s “universal computing machine”, originally a conjecture in pure mathematics. Many other examples could be added to the list, starting with fire, the wheel, writing, and the number system.

Indeed, it’s arguable that major breakthroughs have been coming more slowly since the 1940s because science has become an industry, and scientists are now treated as fungible workers and measured by results. Measured so precisely and continually, with such serious consequences for those who fall behind, that they no longer have time to think or create anything important. They are forced to jump so many hurdles on the way to success that cheating and faking have become endemic. Perhaps when it comes to science, the rule should be “You get what you don’t measure”.

Looking at China’s immense achievement over the past 45 years, one suspects that the West could do with a few more people of Chou Enlai’s stature and vision.