Ships at sea do not go a single day without seeing plastic garbage. Giant nets 30 miles long drag the oceans killing millions of sea creatures, including birds and mammals. These are simply 'by-products' to be tossed overboard. The whole planet has become a war zone generating a bio-crisis not just for individual species, but for entire webs of life. Human beings are now altering the basic physiology of the planet.
Industrial contamination is pervasive, even in the fat cells of Antarctic penguins.
The rain is not only acid but toxic. Whether industrialism warms or cools the atmosphere, its unprecedented chemical experiment threatens to reconfigure life in ways barely imaginable, but undoubtedly for the worse. All empires turn out to be relatively short-lived enterprises that finally betray their own subjects. Despite its enormous cost to the rest of life, modern civilization has engendered a mode of existence that fails to provide even the barest essentials for a fifth of humanity or to satisfy the fundamental psychic needs of the rest. Strangely, our very anthropocentrism may be our own undoing.