In article ,
Martin Cragg-Barber wrote:

Another question arising from this is whether the total amount of
chemical diversity has increased with this spread of 'totalitarian
agriculture'. If there is more diversity then at some point won't
mutating bacteria evolve to fill the gap and make use of the man-made
chemicals? Or is the chemical factory represented by say, a mammal
species, already such a diversity that our new chemicals are a poor
substitute?

Hi, Martin. Long time no post.

Microorganisms are already diverse enough to metabolize most synthetic
organics. Wood-rotting fungi are among the best, since anything that
can decompose lignin can decompose almost anything. A successful
technique of bioremediation is to plow an inoculum of wood chips
infected with appropriate fungi into contaminated soil, where the fungi
will break down even awful stuff like PCBs with remarkable speed, e.g.
95% in one growing season.

Although mammalian livers are fairly good at breaking down synthetic
organics, they often do so by converting it to worse stuff, and they
aren't very efficient or durable especially in this role.

I don't think there's anything out there that can consume common
plastics, though. Perhaps in a few generations landfill sites will
become valuable open pit mines for low grade fuel for industrial and
power generation purposes, with recovered metals a valuable side
product. No doubt people of that era will hate us for our selfish
wastefulness.

As for the original poster, who appears to be starting to foam at the
mouth, it's still possible to live as a hunter-gatherer in a few parts
of the world, albeit not very well or very long. Even in its Edenic
state before agriculture or even before the genus Homo arose, the world
wasn't capable of integrating more than a few million or perhaps tens
of millions of humans imperceptibly into the system. Considering that
the entire Pleistocene megafauna of North America, which persisted a
good deal longer than that of Eurasia, and almost all other large
mammals, vanished rapidly after the advent of humans to the western
hemisphere, maybe intelligent animals are just a Really Bad Idea, even
in small numbers.

So the original poster, to prove his sincerity, should pick an
alternative: (1) go live as a hunter-gatherer himself (2) abstain from
all products of totalitarian agriculture and the material culture it
supports (3) be one of the first to join the six or so billion people
who are going to have to vanish to make a world without agriculture or
(4) work to ameliorate the existing situation.

Note that even the superficially idyllic Eastern Woodland culture I
described persisted only on the scale of centuries, and would likely
have reached its limit due to population growth in a few centuries more
had it not been obliterated by European diseases and the Europeans who
extirpated the survivors. People always destroy their environments to
the limit of their technology, and then develop more technology, expand
their population, and repeat. The endpoint is a population living in
misery on the edge of famine, limited by periodic epidemics, wars and
crop failures, exploiting their environment to the limit of their
technical ability, resorting to desperate measures like infanticide.
This situation has occurred through out history and can be seen in
parts of the world today. Who isn't following this Malthusian
pattern? Western culture, of course, with its low birthrate, high
standard of living, extremely high technological level, and massive
consumption of the world's nonrenewable resources.

Happy New Year.