By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Columnist

It’s time for another Earth Notes column. You may have heard of the Anthropocene Epoch. The International Union of Geological Sciences is debating which geological indicators would be appropriate for the boundary between the current Holocene Epoch and the incoming Anthropocene. Discussion focuses on the first appearance of man-made plastics in Earth’s sediments, and the first appearance of radioactive particles that don’t occur naturally. Researchers in the far-distant future might say with assurance that plastics and bizarre radioactive isotopes didn’t exist before humans began messing with the ecology of Earth.

By the way, have you heard the news that water in plastic bottles may slowly be poisoning people who drink it? If you haven’t, that’s probably because it’s another scientific fact, and denialists choose to ignore it. You know, like the fact that 2023 was the hottest year Earth has experienced in about 125,000 years. Denialists don’t want to hear that, because they don’t trust scientists to tell the truth. That’s a shame, because Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

Consequently, denialists stay ignorant of scientific truth and enslaved by traditional dogma. Dogma long has been an enemy of scientific inquiry. People believe nonsense that theocrats and autocrats feed them, while choosing to be ignorant of insights from the brightest scientific thinkers on Earth. When philosophers confront facts, which challenge their beliefs, they change their beliefs. When dogmatists confront facts, which challenge their beliefs, they change the facts. Remember Kellyanne Conway’s famous “alternative facts?” There’s no such thing.

Here are some real facts. Researchers at Columbia University found roughly a quarter-million particles of nanoplastics lurking in commercial plastic bottles of water. They’re so small — just billionths of a meter — they’ve only recently become detectable. They’re tiny enough to invade human body cells. Researchers eventually may determine how dangerous they are when we ingest them, but it’s hard to imagine they could be beneficial.

During the last few decades, microscopic plastic waste has been found everywhere on earth that is inhabited by humans, from Antarctica to the peaks of the Himalayas. It has spread throughout the food chain, including being discovered inside nearly every living species examined. Humans have invented a plastic-waste Earth.

Pope Francis wrote, “Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth…covered with rubbish.” It’s become clear that, in order for God’s kingdom to come on Earth, our junky stuff has to go. Unless we find a way to inhabit Earth without turning it into a garbage dump, there is a time, not far away, when we and our “free market” dogma will be forced to leave this little blue planet – against our will, and forever.

Once we’ve polluted, flooded, burned and poisoned our habitable environment beyond its ability to recover, Earth will force us into extinction. Eons after that, the record of our presence will be reduced to a thin boundary-line of sediment, separating the centuries we existed on this planet from the centuries after we were driven out of Eden by our own bad decisions.

We may have passed that point without so much as noticing. Just as we now are sleepwalking into dictatorship, we may already, while half asleep, have stumbled onto the road to extinction. If that turns out to be a fact, we’ll find out soon enough.

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton and Bath, now residing in Auburn.