As we close out 2021, I am less concerned about supply imbalance than I am about natural balance, and the harmony of our world’s environment. We’ll figure out higher prices and supply shortages. Sure, it’s causing problems, but it’s a hiccup – we can solve pricing issues and manage material shortages. But, what happens when we run out of fresh water, when we have droughts, when we have uncontrollable fires, and when we have no more room for our garbage? The world is broken and part of the reason is technology.

As Jennifer Morris, CEO for Nature Conservancy, puts it:

“The science is crystal clear: the next decade is a critical one for the future of the Earth. The decisions we make now will have tremendous impact on the future of threatened species, on critical habitats and ecosystems, and even on the well-being of billions of people.”

The dichotomy of our situation, our civilization, the environment we live in, never ceases to amaze me. I’m referring to the changes created by new technology versus natural balance. On the one hand we have the Elon Musks and Richard Bransons of the world, offering us glimpses of outer space and other breakthroughs of gigantic proportions.

We have incredible medical discoveries, software improvements changing daily, new synthetics that make our lives easier and more efficient. We have unimaginable gadgets that purportedly improve our lives. Indeed, there’s so much technical change occurring so fast, it’s just plain mind-boggling. Just look at our industry: new presses, new materials, new chemistries, and so on.

But, if you’re with me so far: These technological steps forward need to be considered with the question, “At what cost?”

One of my morning routines is reading Richard Rohr’s meditation. RR, as I call him, is a far-out Jesuit priest who helped found the Center of Action and Contemplation. He doesn’t think or write like a Jesuit priest. At times he reminds me of Gerald Manley Hopkins, the English poet and Jesuit priest who lived in the late 1800s.

RR frequently makes me think of Hopkins’ “dappled sunlight.” He is the “pause” in my life, even for five minutes, while reading his reflections. He makes me reflect on change and at what cost.

Listen to this:
We need to reflect on the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet Earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Theologian, scholar, and Cherokee descendant Randy Woodley describes the difference between the attitude of early North American settlers and the indigenous people who were already present on the land. He writes:

“The very land itself meant something quite different to the newcomer than it did to the host people. Something was missing. The difficulty, as the Natives saw it, was with the settlers themselves and their failure to tread lightly, with humility and respect, on the land. The settlers wanted to live on the land, but the host people lived with the land. Living on the land means objectifying the land and natural resources and being shortsighted concerning the future. Living with the land means respecting the natural balance.”

And, that’s my point, respecting natural balance. I know, some of you may think I’ve gone off the deep end. Really, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I have always written about harmony and the need for our industry to focus not just on new technology but end of life. I am deeply affected by writings that are sensitive to natural balance and what happens when we get out of sync. We must always be mindful of what change – advancement – causes.

Here’s another one from Helen MacDonald, a very gifted writer, who wrote a wonderful short essay called Ashes. Here’s part of it:

On a dank January day in the mid-1970s, I stood on an English hillside with my mother and watched men with chainsaws cutting up wrecks of trees and tossing brushwood onto fires. I was five years old, amazed by the roaring blades and drifting smoke, and troubled too.

“Why are they burning them?” I asked her.

“It’s Dutch elm disease,” she said, pulling at the knot of her headscarf. “All the elm trees are dying of it now.”

Her words confused me. I’d assumed until then that the countryside was an eternally unchanging place. At that time, Dutch elm disease was spreading across continents, blight had killed four billion American chestnuts, and catastrophic new tree diseases were to follow. Last week that cold hillside of my childhood came to mind as I drove through rural Suffolk, past painted farmhouses and arable fields sloping under a haze of summer clouds. The ash trees on this stretch of road were obviously dying.  Their once-luxuriant crowns had thinned to an eerie transparency; instead of a shifting canopy of pinnate leaves, bare twigs showed stark against the sky.

It was my first sight of ash dieback disease, a new and virulent fungal infection that has spread westward across Europe and will likely kill nearly all the ashes in Britain. In America, the effects of the invasive emerald ash borer beetle have been just as devastating. Globalization is the culprit. While there have always been outbreaks of tree disease, about as many have appeared since the 1970s as in all recorded history. 

The accelerating scale and speed of international trade has brought numerous pathogens and pests to species with no natural resistance to them. If you are a tree, death comes hidden in wood veneer, in packing material, in shipping containers, nursery plants, cut flowers, the roots of imported saplings.

Helen is a beautiful writer, and her story evokes memories for me of elm and chestnut trees. She doesn’t mention the pine beetle blight in Western Canada and the US. This, by the way, has been attributed to climate change.

Climate change, globalization, new technology – I put it all in the same bucket. It doesn’t make any difference. We have disrupted natural harmony, not just here in America, but throughout the world.

Jennifer Morris, Richard Rohr, and Helen MacDonald are just three who are telling us to wake up. As we enter post-Covid 2022, my fervent wish is for all of us to take a moment to think about the effect of change. Will it bring not just efficiency and lower costs? Will it help to make this planet a better place for all of us?

There is no reason to discuss what plastic has done for our world. It has helped our world; it has saved lives; it has reduced waste; it has created countless products or additions to products so everyone benefits. I am referring to just packaging, not resin development. I think you get my point. The dilemma, of course, is we didn’t think about end of life. We didn’t think about natural balance.

Climate change, globalization, beetles and bugs that infect and destroy natural balance, pressure sensitive waste, that’s what I’m talking about.

Let us strike a new bargain in 2022 and onward. Let us commit to diverting non-recyclables into useful, less invasive, end of life applications than landfill. Yes, it will cost money, and yes, it means you will have to change.

But change will help us move toward natural balance, and that is my wish and prayer for the coming year.

Another Letter from the Earth.


Calvin Frost is chairman of Channeled Resources Group, headquartered in Chicago, the parent company of Maratech International and GMC Coating. His email address is
[email protected].