Plastics are Everywhere
We and nature live with the legacy.
Our assumptions about the land around us tend toward recency bias. Those who mourn the disappearance of childhood vistas rarely stop to consider that the farmer’s field they knew so well once featured quite different ecological systems.
I grew up in a vast housing development built in the late fifties and early sixties in North Woodmere, NY, on Long Island. (I only admit this to my closest friends and subscribers!) Every house sprung up in the span of a few years. Every yard started bare. Every street tree found its place when someone dug a hole.
But before developers moved in, our neighborhood consisted largely of woods and wetlands. The woods got cleared to make a clean slate for builders, and I’ve always suspected that engineers filled in many wetlands before there were laws against such things. Remnants of the wetlands did persist at the margins, becoming a county park that eventually drains into Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, an important estuary that I had no awareness of as a child. Apparently there had also been some farmland in what became North Woodmere, which got incorporated into the development, but before colonists arrived those farms were likely woods and wetlands as well.
In modern times, the woods came to be known as Lord’s Woods, an ironic twist because, while a deity may have made the woods, they earned their moniker not to honor our creator but from a family named Lord who owned the property, subsequently selling it all off.
This is not an uncommon series of events. Streams once ran through Manhattan. Colonists’ axes felled untold numbers of trees in the East before settlers moved west and repeated the practice where deemed necessary. Prairie yielded to the plow. The Army Corps of Engineers drained wetlands. The Bureau of Land Reclamation dammed rivers to create huge reservoirs. They were “reclaiming” the land from nature, but nature owned it first and the native Americans—although they did historically use fire in the landscape—managed it next. The people who built the dams never had first dibs; reclamation is just a story we told.
The name of Pennsylvania—William Penn’s Woods—speaks for itself. The colonists divided it up and promptly cleared great swaths of it. In our vicinity some families maintain uninterrupted ownership of remnants of the original land grants to this day, probably never stopping to consider that vibrant forests grew for millennia where their sterile lawns now sprawl.
According to a study of pre-colonial forests of the Piedmont region conducted in the White Clay Creek watershed of Pennsylvania, about a dozen miles from Puddock Hill:
Beginning in the seventeenth century, colonial activities such as land clearing, agriculture, and milldam construction significantly altered the landscapes, vegetation, and hydrogeomorphology of the northeastern Piedmont region, modern-day USA. Presently, weedy and non-native vegetation dominate the altered riparian zones and hill slopes where old-growth, hardwood forests once prevailed.
Therefore, like the rest of the area, Puddock Hill and surroundings was undoubtedly fully wooded when Europeans arrived, although one must allow for the occasional natural disruption caused by fire or wind that may have created a temporary meadow or two in the area. Over time, it was probably cleared entirely for cropland and fields for grazing dairy herds.
So what we found when we bought the place was a degraded ecology: depleted meadows, fragments of secondary (or tertiary) forest, invasive plants, wetlands turned into manmade ponds. At some point in the late twentieth century, the owners of the property installed perforated PVC piping in an attempt to drain the wet meadow near the small pond for better grazing. I know this because some of the pipe has been exposed by erosion.
I thought of those pipes when I recently came across an article from Inside Climate News entitled “Microplastics Lurk in Freshwater Environments Across Pennsylvania.” The article references a Penn State study of three Pennsylvania watersheds that “found increasing levels of microplastics from the 1950s to the 21st century, consistent with the boom in worldwide plastic production that continues today.”
One of the sites was John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, where the presence of microplastics might seem predictable given its location within Philadelphia city limits, near highways, train tracks, and the airport. But scientists also found microplastics at a rural reservoir in the central part of the state.
Microplastics can carry other pollutants, and we don’t yet fully know the harms they do themselves to living things in the environment. When fish and other aquatic animals consume microplastics, the particles travel up the food chain, where they “can interrupt animals’ life cycles, disrupting reproduction and affecting cellular functioning.” Scientists have only recently begun to study their effect on human health, but it will likely turn out to be consequential.
I wonder what those PVC pipes, as they slowly degrade under the wet meadow, are doing to organisms in the soil, arthropods that consume those organisms, amphibians in the nearby pond, and fish and birds in the trees that eat the arthropods. I wonder what it’s doing to all of us.
We can certainly mourn the lost landscapes of memory. But we should also worry about how we’re harming the ecology where we rarely stop to look.
Spring has come to the desert.
European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are all over the non-native fruit trees. Here on our Meyer lemon tree:
Another on our grapefruit tree:
Non-native Indian hawthorn (Rhaphiolepis indica) flowers in part sun:
Crane flower or bird of paradise (Strelitzia reginae), a South African plant, also grows in part shade:
