The Silvery Tay and the Silvery Wrapped Plastic Fields...

If there's an issue that's a health issue as well as an environmental one that's got to be plastic. There's been a lot of discussion recently about the alarming amount of plastic in our oceans, from the large scale of the giant island of waste in the North Pacific to the small scale of the fibres and particles that end up in fish. A study found that Inuit women who eat a high proportion of fish and animal fat in their diet may pass enough PCB etc to cause liver and skin problems through their breast milk to their babies in just a year.

The silvery Tay and the plastic you don't often see: the silvery plastic wrapped fields...

Plastic is used right through the processes of our industrial world, in food production as much as anywhere. The wrapping we see as consumers is just the end of a long trail. In my times involved in farming and food businesses I've seen plastic being used and discarded at every step of the way, from bales of hay and straw wrapped in tons of it, to ingredients arriving at a bakery in polystyrene boxes, and palettes of product being cling-filmed for their delivery on to one of the massive food hubs that supply the supermarkets. The photo above taken from Kinnoull Hill here in Perthshows, to the left in the distance, a kind of low level fleese/greenhouse for veg crops.
Waste plastic was identified as a problem way back in the 60's in Vance Packard's book, "The Waste Makers", and what have we done about it? Meanwhile, I think it's effecting our health more than we realise. When I've been treating people in the hands-on way I've noticed for years that they tend to have right sided sciatica rather than on the left. Your liver sits on your right side and I think it's at least partly toxic stress, from chemicals much more than alcohol etc because I see this in patients who don't drink at all, that causes it.
So what do we do? Sadly I don't think we'll generally do anything on a scale that might make a real difference until we're forced to - as we're so locked up in the industrial way of life - until the industrial world collapses around our ears. And then? time to take to the hills... here's Ruth and I doing just that in the LogCabavan and using waste plastic as insulation: