Plastic and tap water
Your excellent article on contamination of water (A world with plastic on tap, 15 September) is limited by its anthropocentricity. It’s not just our own nest we’re fouling, but the homes of myriad aquatic species, from newts and blue whales to migrating salmon and waterlilies. I’m thinking particularly of phytoplankton (a million in a litre of seawater) which generate half the planet’s oxygen. By defiling their habitat, we may be literally depriving ourselves of breath.
Whose amniotic fluid are we poisoning? The ways we violate, disrupt, and discriminate against the intricate ecologies of our [estimated] 8.7m non-human co-species are a fundamentalism that needs a name. How about “Earthism”?
Human survival depends on radically recalibrating our relationship with this multi-voiced, sentient, uniquely beautiful planet; on evolving from a paradigm based on abuse and dominance to a dance of ecozoic reciprocity, to thinking, feeling and sensing like a biosphere.
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
• A good, timely articles on plastics, which have alarmed me since the mid-1970s. Unfortunately the contamination will increasingly include air pollution. Abandoned plastics are slowly turning into dust around the planet. Clever heads are needed to come up with solutions. The quicker the better.
Michael Cowan
Conondale, Queensland, Australia
• I was really pleased about the findings reported in your article A world with plastic on tap for two reasons. First, at last it is found that humans – the creators of plastic – are also suffering the results and not only the marine creatures. Second, maybe now effective efforts will be made to reduce the problem.
Ingrid Carstens
Meise, Belgium
• May I congratulate the Guardian Weekly and Damian Carrington on one of the most creative bits of writing I have seen for years. From a handful of water samples from a few selected locations found to contain a few nanoparticles of plastic of unknown morbidity, and the accumulation of plastic in eddy currents in certain oceanic locations, to the menace of a world swimming in plastic is a leap of Olympic magnitude. To have built such a great story from such a slight database was a feat of such creativity that it should not go unrecognised.
David Barker
Bunbury, Western Australia
• When we read that 72% of tap water is contaminated by microplastic particles, how do we react? By buying bottled water: a conundrum.
Elizabeth Keating
Orcemont, France
• In order to read the headline article A world with plastic on tap, I had to first cut away the plastic wrapping.
Julie Price
Garlin, France
Myanmar leader’s silence
George Monbiot suggests that Aung San Suu Kyi is silent because she fears losing power (Comment, 15 September). A more charitable view is that she fears not for herself but for her country which has suffered repeated coups ever since her father Gen Aung San was assassinated in 1947. The generals still hold all the real power in reserve, and could undo decades of struggle and pitch the country into more years of misery.
Monbiot thinks she has not read the UN report and knows nothing about Rakhine state. I am convinced she reads everything. And in 1997 when she was under house arrest, she told me, “We really don’t have a very good record on how we’ve treated Muslims in Arakhan.” She urged others in Myanmar to join her in speaking out against the army’s atrocities in the tribal states, and said one of her dreams was for meaningful dialogue between Buddhists and other faiths.
She is now finding it’s a lot easier to hold high ideals when you’re under arrest than when you’re the one who holds the power. Perhaps only shame will make her do the speaking out she once advocated, but will it be too late?
Roger Bowen
Cambridge, UK
Briefly
• Napoleon the nice (8 September)? Certainly not. If he had lived in the 20th century he would have been considered on a par with Hitler or Stalin, or other similar butchers. If, as Kim Willsher says, “many French see him as representing a warmongering, authoritarian regime”, they are totally right. Napoleon had no respect whatsoever for the life of his countrymen, and much less for the life of the populations in the countries his armies invaded.
José María Gallardo Durán
Campanario, Spain
• The headline on the piece by Matt Haig on the back of the 15 September issue reads “I used to think that social media was a force for good …” “Was”? Surely “media” is still plural and “medium” is the singular form. Or “has” the social media so corrupted our language that singular and plural are now interchangeable?
Bill Atkin
Wellington, New Zealand
• The Shortcuts article about the stowaway scorpion (15 September) reminded me of sitting in my aircraft seat in Mumbai a few years ago. After an interminable delay on the taxiway, the pilot finally expressed his apologies, telling us that they had needed to await the arrival of a beekeeper to remove a swarm of bees from the first-class toilet.
Anthony Walter
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
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