TREES AS CLIMATE MODULATORS.

Our Magnificent Trees.

Fall is coming to its wintry end here in the northeast.  The leaves have fallen and accumulate in crunchy red-brown piles and wind rows. The bare trees stand out against the sky in their complex and puzzling tracery. Now rather than seeing a forest in its varying hues of green, one can actually see the individual  trees which make it up.  Our native forests once covered near all the land,  in many places they still persist as diverse woodlands comprised  of species of oak, hickories, tupelo, black walnut, beech, sassafras, maple, birch, pines, and so many more. Now that winter approaches they can be appreciated as individuals. 

Our national US Forest Service reminds us that trees and forests are what make this earth habitable. By the process of photosynthesis each mature tree can remove from the atmosphere more than 48 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide from the air each year (USFS).  This wondrous chemical process occurs in the green leaves where, powered by sunlight, CO2 gas from the air combines with water from the soil to produce carbohydrates, such as simple sugars.  And thankfully, for us air breathers, as a result of this chemical reaction, trees give off oxygen as a waste product. The amount of O2 released by a mature tree is claimed (USFS) to be enough oxygen to sustain four individuals  for a day (or one of us for four days).  

But oxygen is not the tree’s sole benefit to us humans.  The simple sugars they produce by photosynthesis  are polymerized by specialized cells to produce complex sugars, starches, and most importantly, insoluble, tough, cellulose. 

Cellulose is used as a support tissue to maintain a tree’s structure and to insure access to sunlight and, as well, to enable the tree to transport water up to its leaves and to store sugars produced in the leaves.  Cellulose makes up the wood (it’s transport and structural tissue) , as well as bark, leaves and roots. 

It is by this process —cellulose production—that a tree can store so much of the carbon it removes from the air.  The carbon atoms are tucked  away in the C-H-O polymer molecules of cellulose, the tissue that serves for support and for food and water transport.  Aside from the water and other fluids in a tree,  cellulose  comprises most of a tree’s mass.  The roots 

comprise about 20% of the tree’s biomass, it’s trunk (60%), branches and stems (15%)  and leaves (5%) of the tree. 

Each year, most broad-leaved trees in the temperate forests lose their leaves—but this amount is a small portion  (5%) of the tree’s biomass.  The leaves fall to earth where they slowly decay into humus as they oxidize and give up the CO2 that was stored in the cellulose and form valuable humus which is incorporated into the soil. 

But 95% of the tree holds on to its carbon-storing cellulose in its growin groots, its expanding trunk, and burgeoning and over arching branches and stems.  

Since many trees live  hundreds of years—some even into the thousands—this storage of carbon as solid  cellulose tissue is one  important means by which CO2 in the atmosphere is controlled. Our earth’s innards are geologically and chemically active and tend to spew  out lava (and CO2 gas) regularly at vents and volcanoes.  

It has  been the earth’s forests which for hundreds of millions of years have, among other natural systems, helped to remove and control the build up of this earth warming gas—CO2–and sequester it—-as cellulose -as tree biomass.

A mature oak tree will remove more than 48 pounds of carbon from the air each year as it converts CO2 gas into cellulose tissues which make up the bulk of the solid tree.  That ancient white oak tree in my back yard which is two hundred years old, has removed and stored 480 lbs of carbon every decade, and 4,800 lbs in a century, and almost 10,000 lbs of carbon over its life time-so far.

That is why trees and forests are so important!!!!  Imagine the view from a Vermont or Colorado mountain top over rolling hills carpeted with trees. Each tree in the millions pulling 40/50 pounds of CO2 out of the air each year.  That is how we must envision our forests. 

When that tree dies its carbon will slowly reenter the atmosphere again, But that decay process may take another hundred years to complete.  But here we are speaking of forests made up of many many millions of trees. As one tree dies and gives up its carbon another young tree is taking it in and using it—removing it from the air.  

So this is why our trees and forests  are so import to us. They provide us with both oxygen to breath, and as well, act as modulators of our earths temperature.  

As forests grow and expand they (absorb earth warming carbon) cool the earth’s atmosphere.  And when they shrink and decline, they release stored  carbon and cause the earth to heat up.  They are living thermostats that can remove and sequester from massive amounts of earth warming  carbon dioxide over very long stretches of time.  

Over the millennia humans have cut and burned down our magnificent forests. To add insult to injury they also dug up buried (fossil) carbon (coal and oil) and burned these substances in the sir for fuel in the process generating  CO2 which had been long buried.    Both of these processes destroying forests and adding fossil carbon to the air cause the atmosphere to warm up.  

Evidence from our geologic past support the contention that forests are the best possible way to overcome excessive earth warming.  

It is an established fact that were we able to reforest all those areas on the earth that we have desolated and stripped of forests, we could bring the excess atmospheric fossil carbon dioxide  under control.  

For success,  such a process would also have to be combined with other difficult decisions about how we use and abuse fossil fuels, and how to control and maintain the human population on the earth at sustainable levels.  Seven billion souls and going up is a sure path to catastrophe. 

Please don’t cut down that tree. Please plant another in the  place of one which has died or been cut. But individual  trees are only a part of a living forest.  It is our forests which make the earth truly habitable and help keep it cool. 

 

BALD EAGLE SPOTTED OVER PORT JEFF, NY

 We spotted a bald eagle, (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) flying over Port Jefferson Village in Suffolk County , New York yesterday December 12,  2021.  High up in the blue sky the  dark “ironing board” shaped wings and the white head were unmistakable markers for an adult.  It made a few slow turns perhaps two to three hundred feet up and then glided off toward the East going toward Long Island Sound.  It was my first glimpse of this beautiful species here in Brookhaven Town. But others have reported sitings recently over central Long Island and some report a nesting site not far away some place in a north shore community.

It’s amazing  that in 1960 there were only less then five hundred nesting pairs in all of the lower 48, and now ornithologists claim there may be 150,000 individuals in the USA.  This is clearly an example of how we can by controlling harmful and persistent pesticides and establishing protective laws we can win the war against species extinctions. 

Another great success is the bird Benjamin Franklin preferred as the national bird   the American Turkey, (Meleagris gallopavo)/there were none on Long Island perhaps since the mid 18th century. While doing field work in a rural area a farm field  in Riverhead in the 1970s I saw my first Turkey track and photographed it as extraordinary.  Then perhaps a year later again  in the field in Riverhead, I spotted my first Turkey roosting on a tree.  Today huge flocks of them are reported from all over Long Island.  They often stop traffic when a big flock crosses a road.  Just this fall a report from East Quogue Long Island indicated that a back yard was invaded by a flock of twenty Turkey. 

USA “UNRECOGNIZABLE”: BRIAN WILLIAMS

Someone once said everyone, even an average person, has one good novel in their memory bank to publish. Perhaps a corollary of that is that a TV journalist, (even those who habitually embellish war experiences)  still might  one day have a really great piece of broadcasting to share with their viewers.  

Brian Willams, the retiring and now former NBC, Nightly News  anchor, finally said something all Americans can (believe happened and) fully agree with.  On his last 11 PM, MSNBC broadcast, Brian issued a gracefully written, poignant and thoughtful warning to his viewers: that “he will wake up tomorrow in the America of 2021 …a nation unrecognizable to those who came before us…”

Yes, even relatively young Brian (62 years) is aware  that the USA has in 2021 become  unrecognizable.  Sadly a good part  of the decline and negative changes that have recently occurred  to this now unrecognizable nation, can be in some ways attributed to Brian and his fringe,  left-wing colleagues on MSNBC.  So perhaps this is a Brian “mea culpa”. Not sure. 

I do agree with Brian…the US is unrecognizable,  and for me, a decade older, the changes are even more stark and the nation even more self-flagellating, self-destructive, decadent and on the wrong course .  In fact, in this year of 2021 I would say the operative word is  not “unrecognizable”, that word simply implies change of any kind. I would prefer the word “pathetic”.  

Under the short term ministrations of the Biden team the USA has become pathetic— a word which better describes and fits the actual situation. It  means: arousing pity, vulnerable, miserably inadequate, of very low standard, exasperating, …even obscene. 

Our leadership  in Washington— based only on their calamitous performances—is shot through with obvious incompetents, either too old, or too stupid, or simply out of their depth.  Some have been slotted into powerful positions simply on the basis of the political need for  diversity or inclusiveness, while ignoring the cardinal leadership requirements for those in powerful positions: ability, effectiveness, experience, common sense, and the desire to work selflessly for the people of this nation. 

Our President is an old man, afflicted with all too obvious low energy, bouts of forgetfulness, signs of dementia and perhaps stenosis of the carotid arteries,  all rendering him too weak or tired for the demanding job into which he has been elected. His physical frailty even prevents him from essential face to face encounters with his contemporaries— friend and foe. He and his handlers prefer the safe, fumble proof venue of a zoom meeting with powerful and dangerous adversaries like  Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.  In these encounters,  while  Biden sits surrounded by handlers whispering  into his ear, Chairman Xi and  President  Putin face him alone,  making decisions to advance their national interests as vibrant, powerful men and women are expected to.   Biden projects weakness and  arouses pity and uncertainty—a pathetic ineffective head of a vulnerable nation.

This leadership vacuum gets us pushed around by the Russians in Eastern Europe, by the Chinese in the western Pacific,  and in many other places around the world. The war lords we helped install in Afghanistan ride around in our abandoned military vehicles and are now armed with “gifted” M16s A2 and Beretta M9 handguns which they fire off into the desert air and sell for ready cash to our enemies around the world along with the tons of ammo the Biden team left behind. 

At home we face an economy shattered by a vicious pandemic. In its aftermath, we buffeted by conflicting and short term alternating conflicting demands and mandates.  Medical decisions have become politicized and the credibility of our medical and political leaders has fallen to a low ebb. This is troubling and dangerous. 

The economic impact of the pandemic has created stores and offices with absent workers, food and other shortages, empty shelves, and long waits for imported goods.

Crime has skyrocketed. “Smash and grab” gangs clean the shelves out of upscale retail stores and common drug stores with impunity.  The crime wave continues unabated and ignored and denied by the administration. These folks are those who voted for them. The Democrats  can not prosecute on their own base.  Thus,  fringe left policies of no cash bail, and “progressive” AGs who persist in ignoring felonies and  decline to  prosecute perpetuates and exacerbate the crime wave.  Homicides and violent crime in our major cities have skyrocketed. Fear stalks the land.

Violent criminals instead of facing  incarceration are funneled into the revolving door of a permissive justice system that pours felons right back out onto the street as it prefers to cater to “justice”  of the criminals  rather than safety for  innocent citizen-victims.  Violent offenders are arrested, given a court date and sent out on the street, now with less fear and concern about rearrest. Arrested again for a more violent offense than the first until their offense is so egregious ;murder, rape) only then they are arrested and jailed.

Police forces around the nation are defunded, maligned and demoralized while crime soars.  Illegal immigrants (yes they are not here legally) simply walk across our southern border in the hundred of thousands with the aid of human traffickers and coyotes and the drug cartels.  These folks face frightful conditions and  dangers during the passage, as well as abuse from Mexican gangs  and others who have made a lucrative business out of human trafficking.   They bring drugs and yes disease.  Once over the border,  they are rapidly ferried —often by the Biden Administration itself—to all parts of the nation to enlarge a growing undocumented, unvetted, unvaccinated and vulnerable community of immigrants. 

False histories such as the “1669 Project” which view our nation’s past—based not on the historically valid critical analysis of holistic, reality-based past events—but a history cherry picked from the past and viewed through the “pinhole perspective” of a racist fringe, as if that extreme minority view in any way constitutes our national reality.  It does not. These false  and damaging  views are accepted by a compliant media with little critical historical evaluation.  These efforts at historical propaganda have caused great harm to the necessary and desirable  goal of encouraging, fact based and harmonious relations between the diverse groups which make up our citizenry. 

Inflation  is a sinister hidden tax which has crept up from near zero in the Trump administration to 6.5% under Biden. Our 6.5% present inflation rate is a toll or levy quietly added on to everything you purchase.  If your city tax, state tax,  or tax on gasoline is perhaps 10 cents on the dollar, and our an inflation rate is 6.5%, you are actually paying a total silent  “tax” of  16.5 cents on the dollar.   When you hear the term inflation: think “silent tax”.   Furthermore , while the city state and gasoline taxes remain well-publicized and relatively  static …at least for a while….the inflation tax creeps silently higher and higher with no one informing you or requiring your agreement.  

In President Biden’s first month in office, he made a policy faux pas and inflicted a self inflicted wound by stirring up inflation.  To placate his far left ideological supporters he proudly promoted polices to end dependence of fossil fuels and make the nation “green”.  But as in the disaster of Afghanistan the planning process ot achieve this goal (with his gang of incompetents)  went awry.  President Biden proudly exclaimed he was going to close (and did) oil pipelines, disinvest in fossil fuels, force the government fleet to use electric vehicles, as well as restrict oil and gas leases on government land.   These polices acted like a “sucker punch” to the oil and gas industry investors.  Existing fossil fuel investments were tabled and new oil or gas ventures plummeted. But the President’s announcement was poorly timed.  It came just when the world economy was rising out of a deep pandemic induced recession and oil, always on the knife edge of scarcity, could just barely meet demand.  The immediate result was the rapid rise in the cost of oil and gas, both essential commodities. The price of crude on the world market rose steeply. At home, gasoline and and heating oil prices spiked. When the price of this basic commodity goes up, so does all other prices.   Inflation soon bared its ugly head rising from near zero to 6% as a result of these poorly thought out policies. 

Today while the nation is wracked with a forty year high 6.5% level of  inflation, Congress, ignores that threat to our well being (see above) and instead forges ahead with its goal to pass another multi-trillion dollar spending bill that will further spur the inflationary cycle.  Again an example of poor timing and hasty and poorly thought out decision making.  Our ideologue leadership claims these misguided massive borrowing and spending bills will cost the middle class “zero dollars”.   Even in  the face of the obvious —the inflationary impact of waves of more dollars chasing scarce goods in the market place—they (unconvincingly) argue that their huge  expenditures will “reduce living costs” to middle income folks.  Those of us who have experienced inflation know this is simply a lie.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a watch dog group for these expenditures,  has  recently reviewed this bill and concluded that Biden bill can not be reasonably paid for with its “tax the rich” plan.  The CBO concluded that over its ten year period it can not pay for itself and will cost an additional $3 trillion dollars, making the BBB, not $2 trillion dollars, but  a $5 trillion inflationary out lay.  The bill as written will wipe out any claimed  “lower costs for workers” and for the middle class, who would be stuck paying the interest on a huge $5 trillion debt, as well as suffering from a silent “inflation tax”, not  to mention the hefty rise in income tax  as well. 

On the social scene our nation has reverted into a Salem Witch Trials era when it comes to allegations of sexual harassment, or police brutality.  In these areas mere claims of harassment or malfeasance  will destroy a career (or  multiple careers “a la” the Cuomo brothers).  Too often, the accused is not able to face their  accusers. Too often there is no trial, due process, no formal justice, simply a string of multiplying  allegations that seal the  fate of anyone accused. This  publicity generates a knee jerk response from employers and others for dismissal, resignation or ostracism.  The scene brings us back into the 17^th century in Salem Massachusetts  prior to a working justice system when a whisper of witchcraft could get one hung from a tree.   Where is the golden thread of our jurisprudence that the accused  are all innocent until proven guilty? 

So yes Brian, nice for you to opine from the well lit confines of your safe and sterile  studio and to finally notice what we, who actually have to deal with and survive in the real world,  have known all along, that the USA of 2021 is pathetically unrecognizable.  Now when you wake up tomorrow in America—- you too will have to deal with it.  

PERTURBING PLASTIC PROBLEMS—TOO CHEAP TO RECYCLE

When I was boy growing up on Long Island in the 1950s, there were no plastics and no plastic wastes.  That is difficult for Generation X and Z folks to imagine. But in those days, not so long ago, our bread came in its own brown crust, meat left the butcher in heavy waxed paper, fish was often wrapped in yesterday’s newsprint, and cold drinks were sold in a glass bottle.  All soaps were sold as solid bars that were wrapped in paper.  That array of plastic bottles and tubes for shampoos, colorings, and conditioners lined up on your shower shelf simply didn’t exist.  Toothpaste in those awkward plastic tubes were no problem (for us)—

 we had none—and used a dry dentifrice powder that was purchased in a small cardboard box.  

My grandfather lived on a small holding in the countryside where we had no garbage collection.  None was needed.  All our kitchen waste was fed to the dogs, the chickens, or pigs, or composted in the garden.  Any “packaging” was either reused, like glass bottles  (for “canning vegetables or fruits”), or if paper, it was burned to start a fire in the kitchen wood stove. Tin cans were used to store useful “stuff” in the shed, like old rusty  nails, nuts and bolts, fish hooks, fishing lures, old bailing wire, string, even a ball of rare aluminum foil.  When we had no more use for tin cans we crushed them flat and dumped them in the trash pit for burial among the broken glass jars, bits of shattered ceramics, and other really useless “waste”.  Grandpa’s “landfill” waste pit was dug four feet deep and no bigger than a wash tub.  and I had never seen it full.   But I know for sure there were no plastics in there.  

We did have a brown “plastic” substance called Bakelite, and of course some cellophane….but no clear, colorful plastic bags containers and packaging like that which overwhelms us today.  

Then too, we were not visually assaulted by discarded plastic bags fluttering in our trees or bushes, or empty cast off plastic bottles rolling around in the gutter, or the myriad colors and fragments of plastic junk that now float up onto the strand lines on our beaches.  There were no plastic wastes ( no consumer packaging) to casually throw away or somehow escape into the environment.  Today those of us who actually separate our garbage for collection, are aware that the stuff we wanted to consume or use is encased in plastic—bottles, various containers and packaging —which constitute three times the volume of the actual products within.  And the vast majority of it is plastic! 

So what is this plastic stuff that is so common?  The word, like many of in our language is from the Greek.  ”Plastikos” (πλαστικός) in Greek means a solid substance that can change its shape or be deformed.  This characteristic to change shape is what gave our modern “plastics” their name.  Plastics are light in weight, chemically  stable and most importantly can be heated and then molded into almost any shape, from a complex solid, to a thin transparent or translucent  film, or to be spun into a micro thin fiber to be woven with others into a fabric, a fishing line, a rope, or a ship’s hawser. 

Modern day commercial “plastics”are part of a group of chemicals known as polymers.  These  substances are composed of repeating similar units called “monomers” each bound together into long chains called polymers. .  Polymers can occur naturally or be man-made.  There are many naturally occurring polymers.  Cellulose which is produced by plants as a support tissue  is a natural  polymer formed from chains of  glucose molecules . Other natural polymers are the DNA molecule, and proteins, like egg albumin. Fatty acids are  monomers which combine in the body to form polymers called triglycerides.  Other polymers  occurring in nature are natural shellac, amber, and even petroleum itself which is a mixture of hydrocarbon polymers.  

Man-made or synthetic plastics are produced  by bonding together monomers derived from petroleum products or natural gas. To produce synthetic polymers  like plastic,  “feedstocks”  from natural gas and “distillate wastes” from the oil refining process such as  naphtha, ethylene, and propylene are used to produce the vast quantities of plastics now in use.  These monomers  are bonded together  by heat, pressure and chemical catalysts (in a process termed polymerization)  to form the various plastic polymers.

Variations in monomer chemistry can change the properties of the plastic end-product.  If the carbon chain has the element chlorine in its monomer line-up,  the resulting  polymer may be  termed a “polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic”.  PVC is white and brittle and is often used in plumbing as “PVC pipe”.  It is also used to form ducts, roofing, flooring, cladding for structures, and coating for wires and cables. The slippery polymer “Teflon” is made up of carbon chain monomers with the element fluorine bound to some of the carbon atoms.  Other polymers use ethylene as the unit monomer  and combine this with a salt of terephtalic acid to produce the polymer polyethylene terepthalate or PET.   This polymer plastic is one of the most common.  It is a clear, strong and lightweight plastic used to make innumerable soft drink, water and other bottles. 

Today, almost anything one buys is packaged in plastics.  One often needs a good pair of pliers and a strong scissor just to get at product you actually purchased on the inside.  Even bulk items like wood chips and garden mulch are packed in huge, thick, plastic bags.  The bags are stacked high on wood pallets then wrapped again in hundreds of feet of yard-wide  thin plastic film to keep the pallets and the bags intact.  I calculated once that each pallet of organic wood chip mulch require a mass of plastic perhaps the size of a football,  just to get the “organic” mulch product to your back yard.  Not a good deal in terms of energy used and petroleum wasted. 

The PET ( polyethylene terephalate ) bottle was patented in 1973.  It was first used, to improve the sale of carbonated beverages but is now produced in unbelievably massive numbers  to accommodate the “plastic throwaway culture”. Cheap plastic has encouraged and made possible the “single use then dump it culture” that is inundating the planet today.  The UK science museum (sciencemuseum.org.uk) claims that 500 billion PET bottles are sold each year.  That amounts to six dozen polyethylene bottles for every man, woman and child in the entire world….each and every year year.  But only small fraction  are actually recycled, one can only image the massive amount of waste plastics that has been generated only by this one kind of polymer over the five decades that PET has beef produced 

According to the Guardian, December 1,  2021 (guardian.com.uk ) “Deluge of Plastic Waste” by Oliver Milman, the USA,

the world’s most affluent nation, generates 42 million metric tons of plastic  each year. That amount represents more plastic waste than that produced by all of the thirty EU nations combined.   Since 1960 plastic waste has increased almost exponentially.  Today, it is often claimed that each person in the US generates almost 300 pounds of the stuff per person per year.   That is about 52.5 million tons of plastic waste that is produced each year and in recent years much of it (see below) is dumped into the environment every year.  According to the Guardian, USA plastic waste is almost nine times (9x) greater than other similarly “advanced” countries around the world.  

Affluent US consumers purchase vast amounts of “goods” of all sorts from all over the world and almost all of it comes packed, wrapped or covered with plastic. We in the USA have become  truly addicted to the use of plastics and now assume it is just normal packaging.  But it is not.  It takes about 450 years for a plastic PET bottle to fully degrade in a land fill.  Plastics hang around a long time. 

Because we generate so much “throw away” plastic, such as plastic straws, spoons and forks, dishes, packaging, bags, containers of all kinds, and components of other manufactured goods we have way too much waste to recycle. According to the Guardian, of the 52 million tons of plastic we produce annually,  more than two (2) million tons leak out each year  into the environment.  Of that two million tons, which is scattered on land,  much of it eventually enters  (or is tossed) into streams and rivers and ultimately flows downstream into larger bodies of water and ultimately enters into the ocean.  

But we are not alone, the rest of the world and its plastic wastes also contribute to this waste stream. About 9 million tons of waste are estimated to enter the marine environment each year.  Some years ago, while on a long-distance sailing voyage across the Pacific Ocean an environmentally  concerned sailor made derailed records of the floating plastics he encountered on the crossing. These data revealed a massive floating “island” of waste plastic in the Pacific Ocean, the size of the state of Texas.  More recently marine biologists have studied this “Pacific Ocean plastic Sargasso Sea” for living organism. There among the floating debris they found many organisms (mussels, crabs, barnacles) of the coastal ocean which had been washed out to sea on plastic waste and have adapted to now new “plastic island” environment.   Some have estimated that by 2030 the total waste accumulated in the marine environmentaccording to the Guardian article  could reach 53 million tons, an amount which is roughly half of all fish caught globally from the ocean in an year.

Plastic is theoretically recyclable,  but  much of it, probably close 60%, is not recycled.  Plastics are not a homogeneous material.  Different plastics: PET, PVC, etc. all have different physical properties and melting points.   If the collected plastics are not sorted properly, when heated for recycling, the resulting “melt” produces an unstable useless sludge that must be discarded. 

Plastics have visual identity marks, but sorting must be done by hand, and for this reason is very time consuming.  Since the product that is being sorted is of low value, to be economically profitable,  large numbers must be sorted to make the process worth the effort.  

Until recently, China made use of plastic waste and the rest of the world collected its used plastics  and sent these wastes off to China.  There, low-wage workers patiently sorted and collected the various types of plastics for recycling.   But over the years, China became more affluent, and fewer and fewer low wage workers were available for plastic scavenging.  Then too, the volume of throw away plastics in use spiked exponentially into enormous amounts.   By 2018 there was so much plastic in the world to be recycled, that it’s value as a commodity collapsed.  At that time, even in populous China there were not enough low wage workers to make recycling profitable.  In 2018 China closed its ports to ships carrying plastic waste.  Affluent nations were forced to  send their plastic wastes to other poor nations such as Vietnam and Thailand. But soon these nations too ran out of workers and landfill space and began simply burning plastic waste or burying it in domestic landfills to cope with the massive volume.  Then too when space for dumping and illegal burning became a problem, they also turned away the world’s plastic waste. 

Thus those who used throwaway plastics with the comforting thought they the plastic s will be recycled were faced with the reality that they too were  simply adding to their already huge carbon footprint of the “throwaway culture”.  Plastics require significant amounts of fossil fuel energy to produce the polymers, additional energy is used to make the bottles or containers, and more to fill and transport the consumer product. Then when it is consumed even more to collect the plastic waste. Then this waste is sent around the world on fuel burning ships where the unsorted wastes were not recycled at all, but simply buried or burned up in the air to create more pollution of a different and often more insidious, and noxious kind. 

Since plastics are produced from petroleum, and the trend in modern “green” nations is to force a decline in petroleum as a fuel, and also impose limits upon fossil fuel use, producers will be looking encourage the us of throwaways and to  to sell more petroleum distillates to plastic producers.   Thus, in the near future we can expect an incensed financial incentive for more, rather than less plastic pollution, desecrating our lands,  our oceans, and landfills, not less. 

Producers in the affluent nations with their “single-use- throwaway” culture have been so successful in selling and making their products so cheap and so common,  that now a pinch of sand grains form a beach are presently  more valuable than a PET bottle, and no one can afford to spend the time to sort and recycle these wastes because the new product is simply less expensive than the recycled product.   

So though plastics are theoretically recyclable, right now they are simply just colorful land fill waste.  Now they are chemically dangerous, accumulations of non-degradable , non-compostable , solid products that generate a huge carbon footprint just to produce and sell. 

It does not have to be this way. We don’t have to go back to living like the youth of the greatest generation or the silent generation, with limited products and containers of only Bakelite and cellophane, glass and paper.  If we can go to the moon on a whim, we surely can create containers and packaging that are biologically degradable. 

ON ATOMS FROM DEMOCRITUS TO EINSTEIN

 FROM DEMOCRITUS TO EINSTEIN ON ATOMS

The lives of two famous men, Democritus (@ 430 BC) of Abdera in Greece and Albert Einstein  (1879-1955) in Germany were separated by almost 2400 km and 2400 years.  Were it possible for these two to meet, they might have found much in common. They were both creative thinkers who used “thought experiments” to generate hypotheses. They observed and theorized about the material world in their own very unique way.  Both mused about the nature of the ultimate particles the “atoms” that make up the physical world.

Democritus (@430 BC) the Greek philosopher from Abdera in Thrace  and the other philosophers of ancient Greece, were not restricted only to matters of logic, the “prime mover”, “final cause”, ethics or religion, as often they are today.  In the classical Hellenic world, the  purview of the “philosopher” (literally “lover of wisdom”) extended to all knowledge. So in ancient Athens,  Greek philosophers were able to freely opine about the nature of matter, the heavens and planets, as well as our earth and the physical world.  

Though they formulated their pronouncements without ever making a single formal observation or testing an hypothesis by experiment.  (Much of Einstein’s creative work also relied on  “thought experiments” from which he generated some of  greatest ideas.) However,  in the ancient world, the  philosophical musings of these great minds were just that….untested musings .  Yet these ideas concerning  the nature of matter remained through the long ages, as hypotheses which cried out to be used and teated by those who followed.  

Democritus viewed reality as being restricted to only the material world and for that reason his contemporaries described him as a “materialist”.  Thinking  about the physical world, Democritus, envisioned all matter to be comprised of minuscule building “blocks”, which were indivisible, immutable, infinite in number, as well as hard and uniform.   

Democritus  (or his teacher Leucippus) coined the term “atomos” ( άτομος) for these ultimate building blocks of matter.  The word is formed from the root “tomos” which means to “cut or divide”, and is modified by the alpha privative prefix (“a”) which means “not”. The word can be translated as: “not able to be cut” or “indivisible”.    

For Democritus, the differences in shape and size of these ultimate atomic elements determined the properties of matter.  According to Democritus when material substances combined  or separated they created the illusion of change, but the atoms themselves  remained immutable. (To be clear, these properties of atoms as envisioned by Democritus, were based only on reason and conjecture—not on empirical evidence or testing.)

Democritus’ ideas about atoms were almost lost in the dust of time.  They survived in the writings of others who criticized and lampooned his thinking.  It took two millennia for humans to even begin to rise again to the level where they began to think again about the nature of matter and  the ultimate particles of matter. 

Two millennia after Democritus,  it was an Irishman, Robert Boyle (1627-1691) who began the new intellectual process using the new “scientific method”.  Boyle, was an alchemist, who is considered to be the first modern chemist, who published the “Skeptical Chymist” in 1661. Boyle was greatly influenced by the writings of philosopher Francis Bacon. 

Francis Bacon(1561-1626)

In his “Novum organum” Bacon proposed that knowledge could only be advanced by a new method of inquiry.  He proposed the abandonment of logic-based,  deductive reasoning arguments about the material world (like Democritus’) for those based on observations, testing of proposed hypotheses ,and inductive reasoning. 

It was Boyle who eventually abandoned the alchemist’s quest for the “philosopher’s stone” that would turn base metals like lead into gold and turned to the scientific inquiry of the nature of matter.   Boyle based the study of chemistry on observation, measurement and reproducible experiments.  For these  experiments  which he termed “chemical analysis”, Boyle  had been greatly influenced by an English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon.   

Boyle, also promulgated a law about gases  which would lead to a better understanding of matter.  Boyle discovered (Boyle’s Law) that when the pressure was doubled on an “ideal gas”, kept at a constant temperature, its volume decreased  by one-half.  Doubling  the pressure caused a decrease the volume by half. ( P1x V1 = P2xV2)   Stated another way:for a fixed mass of an ideal gas at a constant temperature , the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume. 

Boyle also theorized  about a “corpuscular theory” of gases (and matter).  These “corpuscles” or “bodies” of which Boyle’s gases  seemed to be comprised were a theory that was very reminiscent of Democritus’ atomic theory.  

But it took another 140 years for the Englishman, John Dalton 1776-1844, to actually reintroduced the idea of Democritus’ atoms. 

Dalton began his career as a self-taught meteorologist who kept records of the change of barometric (air) pressure and how it influenced the weather.  Evaluating his data about the atmosphere,  which is a mixture of gases,  led him to experiments from which he concluded that the total pressure of a mixture of gases is the sum of the pressures of the component gases.  In 1803 he postulated a law which stated just that: Dalton’s  Law states that the total pressures of a mixture of gases is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of the individual component gases, or P (total) = Pa + Pb  + Pc.  

Dalton had an active and inquiring mind. He  investigated many and diverse topics of study.  But his work with gases and how they combine eventually led him to an hypotheses in 1808 that revived Democritus’ atomic theory by concluding that gases must be composed of atoms.  He suggested as well that all the chemical elements (and matter in general) must also be composed of atoms.

Dalton’s  conclusions were: 

a) Elements are composed of extremely small particles, he called “atoms” which can not be divided or destroyed.

b) Each element has distinctive atoms identical in size, mass and other properties. 

c) Atoms can combine in chemical reactions  to form molecules or compounds.

d) Atoms always combine in whole number ratios. 

By comparing  the weights of other elements to  that of hydrogen (H), which he ascribed the value of 1 Dalton produced a table of relative atomic weights. He calculated  the relative weights of other elements: nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, oxygen, and sulfur . His weights were often one half of the weight of now known modern data. The problem with Dalton’s calculations were that he insisted on the simplest of equations.  Using his method, of “the simplest is best” (or “Occam’s razor”)  he formulated his molecules in the simplest possible way.  He could not conceive that some gases might occur as “diatomic” molecules such as nitrogen gas (N2). Dalton imagined water to be H O,  not H2O and oxygen is actually comprised  of two oxygen atoms, with a notation of O2, not a single “ O” as Dalton imagined.

But the intellectual dam was breached, and only a few years later, Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856) an Italian scientist, performed experiments that revealed the actual  existence of atoms that Boyle and Dalton  had  just hypothesizing about.  Avogadro’s experiments demonstrated  that two liters of hydrogen gas, would always combine with exactly one liter of oxygen gas to produce two liters of water vapor at standard temperatures and pressures (STP).  Avogadro concluded for this to occur there must  be discrete particles in the gases that were combining.  These particles must be the atoms of Democritus and Dalton and “corpuscles” of Boyle. 

Avogadro further pointed out that the equal volumes of a pure gas at standard pressure and temperature (STP) which combined to form water vapor, may have different masses, but based on the way they combine, the volumes  must contain an equal number of molecules or atoms. 

In 1811 Avogadro proposed his law   Avogadro’s Law, which states that equal volumes of any two  gases at STP contain equal numbers of atoms or molecules.   That is: the mass of a gas (differing from another) does not imply there are more or less atoms. It is the atoms or molecules which vary in weight. Since atoms or molecules combine in a very specific way, Avogadro finally proved that these invisible atoms or molecules were real.  Democritus was right! 

In 1827 a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, reported observing the unexplained movement of pollen grains suspended in an aqueous solution under the high power of a light microscope.  Brown who termed the jiggling motion of the pollen  “Brownian Motion” could not explain these random movements.

But Albert Einstein could!   It was Albert Einstein in 1905 who theorized that the random motions of the pollen grains as described by Brown must be caused by violent vibrations (the kinetic energy) of the invisible water molecules as they violently and incessantly bumped into the pollen grains.  Einstein grasped on this fact to propose a way to mathematically calculate how many molecules were present, in a given volume, based on the random movements of the water molecules as measured over time. Though the atoms or molecules could not be seen,  the results of their kinetic energy or their movement and impacts on pollen grains could be actually measured. Using these calculations, Einstein predicted a mathematical solution for the actual number of molecules or atoms in a given volume and led the way for this to be calculated. 

These measurements and calculations by Einstein led to other experiments on tiny particles suspended in solutions by Jean Baptiste Perrin, a French scientist who in 1909,  based on Einstein’s calculations actually measured how many atoms or molecules were in a standard unit of gas.   Perrin called this number Avogadro’s Number.  His calculations indicated this value:  6.022 x 10 23^rd power for  the 

number of molecules, (atoms or ions)  in a volume of gas equal to the molecular weight of that gas. 

So finally after two millennia, we know Democritus cogitations and imaginings about the nature of matter was correct.  Matter IS composed of atoms!  But they are not  “a tomos”.   That is they are not the ultimate indivisible particle.  There are “innards” to the atom! But that is another long story.