I grew up in the Seventies. Back then, we had acid rain. We had rivers so filthy that in some stretches not even bacterial life could be detected. We had air so saturated with soot and particulates that in certain places birds quite literally fell out of the sky. This was pollution you didn’t need instruments to detect. You could see it. Taste it. Feel it. Smell it. It announced itself aggressively.
That was the backdrop against which the Green parties emerged. And for good reason. This was not hysteria. This was reality, unmistakable and brutal. When those parties began entering parliaments across Europe, the mainstream parties followed suit, rapidly “going green” in order to hoover up the new voters. Environmentalism became political currency.
And to be fair: much has been achieved since then.
Rivers have been cleaned up. Air quality is better than at any point in living memory. Nature—at least in much of the developed world—is no longer blanketed in trash. Even things like noise pollution have been markedly reduced. Compared to the world of my childhood, this one is cleaner, quieter, and less visibly toxic.
The movement can claim victory. Deservedly so.
But victory creates a problem—especially for movements that have grown accustomed to the comforts of political power, institutional influence, and moral authority. What do you do when your founding cause has largely been addressed? When the obvious enemies have been defeated?
You have two options. You either disband, downsize, and go home. Or—far more appealing—you reinvent the threat. Better yet, you redefine it into something that cannot be seen, heard, smelled, or touched.
Enter CO₂. Enter microplastics.
Perfect villains. Invisible, abstract, and inaccessible to direct human experience. They cannot be verified by the average person without mediation by experts, models, and institutions. They can be inflated, correlated, extrapolated, assumed, and conflated at will. If you can’t see it, people won’t ask questions. And if they do, you can accuse them of ignorance or malice.
The new threats are far more useful than the old ones. Real pollution could be solved—and once solved, it went away. Invisible threats don’t. They linger forever. They scale infinitely. They justify endless regulation, permanent emergency, and uninterrupted relevance.
And just like that, the movement gets a new lease on life. One that doesn’t expire so quickly. Because this time, they learned the lesson: fix a real problem, and you work yourself out of a job. Invent an invisible one, and your future is secure.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/04/health/spoonful-of-microplastics-found-in-peoples-brains-study/