Substack diary no.151: Tuesday, 12th. May 2026

When did we stop calling artificial fibres ‘artificial fibres’? It would seem that marketeers are just as adept at making us forget things as they are at making us think things we don’t want or need are essential. The explosion of ‘artificial’ – man-made – materials after the second world war has had a devastating impact on our lives and the lives of all other life on the planet.

A lot of people are talking about our dependence on petro-chemicals at the moment, and that is entirely understandable given political circumstances. We have surrounded ourselves with plastic clothes, plastic carpets, plastic bowls and containers – the list goes on. Much of it made with chemistries that do not exist in nature, and which therefore nature has no ability to recycle.

We should find this shocking, but many of us don’t. The detritus of mankind is piling up all around us, day in, day out. Forever? Out went natural products – glass bowls, cotton shirts, wool carpets, timber furniture – to be replaced by cheap by-products of the oil industry, turning oil millionaires into oil billionaires in the process.

For me, there are two important questions in all of this:  who do we blame and who should pay to clean up the mess? Are we to blame for demanding cheap products? Products that are only ‘cheap’ because the price we pay does not include the cost of cleaning up our rivers, seas and countryside afterwards. Or is it the marketeers acting on behalf of the oil industry? Once we answer that question we come onto who should pay to clean-up. Is it us for buying the products in the first place, or the marketeers for duping us into buying them and failing to mention the downside?

The answer to the second question is, of course, that we pay. We pay in ever-increasing taxes and prices to clean up. In the Book of Fairness it is stated that The Polluter Pays. A sound principle that I believe most people would agree with. But in the case of the oil industry, it is us that pays. We pay so that billionaires don’t have to. And we carry on buying shirts and carpets made of artificial materials because we think they are cheap. How mad is that?