As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

Astrangia. Credit: Stephen Cairns et al. An illustrated key to the genera and subgenera of the Recent azooxanthellate Scleractinia (Cnidaria, Anthozoa), with an attached glossary, ZooKeys (2012). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.227.3612. Creative Commons Attribution 3.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

Mandy Barker, Ophelia medustica. Specimen collected from Glounthaune shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland, (Pram wheel), 2015. Series: Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals, 2015 In 1816, John Vaughan Thompson was posted to Cork in Ireland as an army Surgeon.

Fatbergs, the congealed mass of fat and discarded items that are increasingly blocking Britain’s sewers, are the consequence of the plastic crisis in Britain and contain potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tests show.

This talk was delivered as the plenary paper for The 11th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Imperial College, London, 2nd August 2016. You can find the full content of the talk beneath the slides in the comments section, or click the gear icon below and select ‘Open speaker notes’ It is presented here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – please use as you wish, but always reference and refer back to this post or the slide show.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilisation is indistinguishable from its garbage.” – Bruce Sterling

Look, I wouldn’t trade the 21st century for any other. We have toilet paper and vitamin-fortified milk and a measles vaccine. We can buy avocados in Fairbanks in January. But sometimes, particularly in the United States, we tend to put too much faith into the transformative powers of technology. Is progress really a curve that sweeps perpetually, unfailingly higher? Wasn’t toy-making or winemaking or milk-making or cheese-making or cement-making sometimes performed with more skill 300 or 700 or 1,900 years ago? I think of a tour guide I once overheard in the Roman Forum. She pointed with the tip of a folded umbrella at an excavation and said, “Notice how the masonry gets better the earlier we go.” Perhaps the most compelling argument against geoengineering is that the whole thing is a massive and ruinous distraction. We ought to be sharply curbing our appetites right now, not having hypothetical debates about where we might build mile-long tea-saucer cannons.