Did you ever spend much time thinking about the weight of the “stuff” the comprises your life? Essayist David Farrier has:
what confronted me was not the airiness of my home but its weight: the immense burden of materials that mark my place on the Earth. I read how a team of scientists, writing in Nature, had estimated that 2020 was the year the mass of human-made materials exceeded that of all living things on the planet: the combined mass of our concrete, asphalt, aggregate, metal, glass, and plastic superseded the one Teratonne (one trillion metric tons) of plants, mammals, fish, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and viruses. By mass, there are now more buildings and infrastructure (1,100 Gt) than there are trees and shrubs (900 Gt); more plastic (8 Gt) than land and marine animals (4 Gt).
The article is called “We’re Gonna Carry That Weight a Long Time” and it’s worth your time.
