23. How systemic racism affects nature and will we drown in plastic waste soon?

Systemic racism — a set of policies, deeply ingrained in and defining how the system works, that deepen racial inequity. People suffer effects of such systems every day, around the globe, and the inequity is visible through job opportunities, treatment by the police, credit scoring and plenty of other aspects of life. The article I am sharing with you today points to yet another victim of systemic racism — city ecosystems.

The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments — medium-easy read. Schell et al. point to something that appears obvious once you know it, but it has probably never crossed your mind. Imagine you have a city you ovserve. There are richer and poorer neighborhoods, and if your city is in a multicultural country, chances are that the less affluent parts are predominantly non-white (systemic racism in action leads to such divisions.) Less rich neighborhoods have less money to spend on the same pool of infrastructure in services as richer ones — fund schools, healthcare, roads, perhaps playgrounds and parks. The spend goes predominantly towards higher necessities first, leaving little to none towards green spaces. Hence parks are smaller, with lesser variety of plants. Less plants means less habitats for animals, meaning less animals and more monocultures. Such spaces contribute to the neighborhood being considered poorer, which attracts less people with money, and the vicious cycle closes. The necessity of green spaces in cities and their benefits for humans are rather well understood (and I’ll try to recommend some studies on this in the near future), so their lack actually reduces welfare in a measurable way. However, as this review study shows, the impact reaches directly to other members of our shared habitat. The authors highlight that urban biological research must take social inequity into consideration to properly account for biodiversity loss in cities. As human population grows, the cities will continue to scale, and increasing biodiversity will require helping it flourish in our concrete jungles. The article is paywalled, though an early release is available on ResearchGate and a live discussion with the lead author is set to take place this coming Friday October 30th at 13:00 EDT (folks around the world note that the U.S. have not shifted the time to winter yet.)

Now many of us are already concerned about the environment, mostly fearing the effects of global warming on life on Earth. We sometimes forget that there are, unfortunately, other human activities that destroy our planet in a different way. One of such threats is plastic pollution. Plastics have become an intrinsic part of life for many of us. Appliances, medication packs, food packages, cosmetics, cars, planes — pretty much all aspects of our lives utilize some plastic elements in them. Some are necessary and improve our life greatly, and plenty are completely unnecessary but are rooted in bad habits (plastic wrapped vegetables, plastic shopping bags, single use cups and plates etc.) Many plastics (worse still, most of the unnecessary ones) are non-recyclable. And because they can take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose, we are building up a debt that will catch up with humans sooner or later. We are already drowning some less privileged counties around the world with our waste, which is not only bad for the planet but also unethical, cruel and just not smart in the long term. So what is humans’ plan to figure this out?

Evaluating scenarios toward zero plastic pollution — medium difficulty read. Lau et al. evaluate different proposed approaches and scenarios of handling plastic waste and model them over next 20 years. The good news — we are not entirely hopeless. The bad news — even in the best case scenario of immediate and coordinated action starting this year we end up with a massive (and I mean over 700 million tons through 2040 massive) amount of plastic predicted to get into our ecosystems. Even worse news — humans have a pretty sad track record on global coordinated action against threats that can kill us all (though, again, were not entirely doomed, yet.) The authors provide a decent review of literature discussing impacts of plastics on plants and animals around the globe, and consider 4 scenarios, varying from business as usual to systemic shift in thinking about plastic production, consumption, collection and recycling. They then model each of them over time to see the results we may expect, including total plastic production and pollution, also computed per plastic type. The text is overall approachable, and carries a wealth of information about both the current state of the world and possible solutions with today’s scientific knowledge. It’s worth mentioning that we may get to a scientific breakthrough in fighting plastic pollution, but relying on future breakthroughs as solutions is a rather bad strategy. So read it and think which of your habits you may want to reconsider.