One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges.
Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and
enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil
rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive
democracy.
Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting
data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on
compliance. These choices reshaped U.S. demographics and institutions,
with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in
history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not
eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and
harder to defend.
The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.
Cumulative retreat
Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the
administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those
laws work.
Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy,
I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but
a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer
of civil rights law.
Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:
• On its first day in office, announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.
• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in
hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such
as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence,
considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic
and demographic representation – as potentially legally suspect.
The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers
and state and local governments using such practices. Federal
prosecutors reportedly investigated federal contractors that consider diversity, characterizing such initiatives as fraud.
• Rescinded an executive order
that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to
ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected
contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This
weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace
discrimination.
Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.
When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities,
discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis
is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go
unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations
and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity.
When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and
freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.
Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Oct. 3, 1965, before
signing the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibited racial discrimination
in the immigration process and repealed quotas heavily favoring immigration from
northern and western Europe. Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ Library
Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity, ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions.
But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral
policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely
on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.
The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.
The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is
dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more
open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that
selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational
participation.
The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.
Though wary of organized religion, the physicist believed that the harmony of universal laws pointed to a higher power.
Historians of modern science have good reason to be grateful to Paul
Arthur Schilpp, professor of philosophy and Methodist clergyman, but
better known as the editor of a series of volumes on “Living
Philosophers,” which included several volumes on scientist-philosophers.
His motto was: “The asking of questions about a philosopher’s meaning
while he is alive.” And to his everlasting credit, he persuaded Albert
Einstein to do what he had resisted all his years: to sit down to write,
in 1946 at age 67, an extensive autobiography — 45 pages long in print.
To be sure, Einstein excluded most of what he called “the merely
personal.” But on the very first page, he shared a memory that will
guide us to the main conclusion of this essay. He wrote that when still
very young, he had searched for an escape from the seemingly hopeless
and demoralizing chase after one’s desires and strivings. That escape
offered itself first in religion. Although brought up as the son of
“entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents,” through the teaching in his
Catholic primary school, mixed with his private instruction in elements
of the Jewish religion, Einstein found within himself a “deep
religiosity” — indeed, “the religious paradise of youth.”
The
accuracy of this memorable experience is documented in other sources,
including the biographical account of Einstein’s sister, Maja. There she
makes a plausible extrapolation: that Einstein’s “religious feeling”
found expression in later years in his deep interest and actions to
ameliorate the difficulties to which fellow Jews were being subjected,
actions ranging from his fights against anti-Semitism to his embrace of
Zionism (in the hope, as he put it in one of his speeches [April 20,
1935], that it would include a “peaceable and friendly cooperation with
the Arab people”). As we shall see, Maja’s extrapolation of the reach of
her brother’s early religious feelings might well have gone much
further.
The primacy of young Albert’s First Paradise came to an
abrupt end. As he put it early in his “Autobiographical Notes,” through
reading popular science books, he came to doubt the stories of the
Bible. Thus, he passed first through what he colorfully described as a
“positively fanatic indulgence in free thinking.”
But then he
found new enchantments. First, at age 12, he read a little book on
Euclidean plane geometry — he called it “holy,” a veritable “Wunder.”
Then, still as a boy, he became entranced by the contemplation of that
huge external, extra-personal world of science, which presented itself
to him “like a great, eternal riddle.” To that study one could devote
oneself, finding thereby “inner freedom and security.” He believed that
choosing the “road to this Paradise,” although quite antithetical to the
first one and less alluring, did prove itself trustworthy. Indeed, by
age 16, he had his father declare him to the authorities as “without
confession,” and for the rest of his life, he tried to dissociate
himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing
his own form of religiousness, just as he was creating his own physics.
These
two realms appeared to him eventually not as separate as numerous
biographers would suggest. On the contrary, my task here is to
demonstrate that at the heart of Einstein’s mature identity there
developed a fusion of his First and his Second Paradise — into a Third
Paradise, where the meaning of a life of brilliant scientific activity
drew on the remnants of his fervent first feelings of youthful
religiosity.
For
this purpose, we shall have to make what may seem like an excursus, but
one that will, in the end, throw light on his overwhelming passion,
throughout his scientific and personal life, to bring about the joining
of these and other seemingly incommensurate aspects, whether in nature
or society.
In 1918, he gave a glimpse of it in a speech (“Prinzipien der Forschung”) honoring the 60th birthday of his friend and colleague Max Planck,
to whose rather metaphysical conception about the purpose of science
Einstein had drifted while moving away from the quite opposite,
positivistic one of an early intellectual mentor, Ernst Mach. As
Einstein put it in that speech, the search for one “simplified and lucid
image of the world” not only was the supreme task for a scientist, but
also corresponded to a psychological need: to flee from personal,
everyday life, with all its dreary disappointments, and escape into the
world of objective perception and thought. Into the formation of such a
world picture, the scientist could place the “center of gravity of his
emotional life [Gefühlsleben].” And in a sentence with special
significance, he added that persevering on the most difficult scientific
problems requires “a state of feeling [Gefühlszustand] similar to that of a religious person or a lover.”
Throughout Einstein’s writings, one can watch him searching for that world picture, for a comprehensive Weltanschauung, one yielding a total conception that, as he put it, would include every empirical fact (Gesamtheit der Erfahrungstatsachen) — not only of physical science, but also of life.
He tried to dissociate himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing his own form of religiousness.
Einstein
was, of course, not alone in this pursuit. The German literature of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries contained a seemingly obsessive
flood of books and essays on the oneness of the world picture. They
included writings by both Ernst Mach and Max Planck, and, for good
measure, a 1912 general manifesto appealing to scholars in all fields of
knowledge to combine their efforts in order to “bring forth a
comprehensive Weltanschauung.” The 34 signatories included
Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand Tönnies, David Hilbert, Jacques
Loeb — and the then still little-known Albert Einstein.
But while
for most others this culturally profound longing for unity — already
embedded in the philosophical and literary works they all had studied —
was mostly the subject of an occasional opportunity for exhortation
(nothing came of the manifesto), for Einstein it was different, a
constant preoccupation responding to a persistent, deeply felt
intellectual and psychological need.
This fact can be most simply
illustrated in Einstein’s scientific writings. As a first example, I
turn to one of my favorite manuscripts in his archive. It is a lengthy
manuscript in his handwriting, of around 1920, titled, in translation,
“Fundamental Ideas and Methods of Relativity.” It contains the passage
in which Einstein revealed what, in his words, was “the happiest thought
of my life [der gluecklichste Gedanke meines Lebens]” — a thought experiment that came to him in 1907: nothing less than the definition of the equivalence principle, later developed in his general relativity theory.
It
occurred to Einstein — thinking first of all in visual terms, as was
usual for him — that if a man were falling from the roof of his house
and tried to let anything drop, it would only move alongside him, thus
indicating the equivalence of acceleration and gravity. In Einstein’s
words, “the acceleration of free fall with respect to the material is
therefore a mighty argument that the postulate of relativity is to be
extended to coordinate systems that move nonuniformly relative to one
another . . . . ”
For the present purpose, I want to draw
attention to another passage in that manuscript. His essay begins in a
largely impersonal, pedagogic tone, similar to that of his first popular
book on relativity, published in 1917. But in a surprising way, in the
section titled “General Relativity Theory,” Einstein suddenly switches
to a personal account. He reports that in the construction of the
special theory, the “thought concerning the Faraday [experiment]
on electromagnetic induction played for me a leading role.” He then
describes that old experiment, in words similar to the first paragraph
of his 1905 relativity paper, concentrating on the well-known fact,
discovered by Faraday in 1831, that the induced current is the same
whether it is the coil or the magnet that is in motion relative to the
other, whereas the “theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon in
these two cases is quite different.”
While other physicists, for
many decades, had been quite satisfied with that difference, here
Einstein reveals a central preoccupation at the depth of his soul: “The
thought that one is dealing here with two fundamentally different cases
was for me unbearable [war mir unertraeglich]. The difference
between these two cases could not be a real difference . . . . The
phenomenon of the electromagnetic induction forced me to postulate the
(special) relativity principle.”
Let
us step back for a moment to contemplate that word “unbearable.” It is
reinforced by a passage in Einstein’s “Autobiographical Notes”: “By and
by I despaired [verzweifelte ich] of discovering the true laws
by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and
the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that
only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to
assured results.” He might have added that the same postulational method
had already been pioneered in their main works by two of his heroes,
Euclid and Newton.
Other physicists — for example, Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg — also reported that at times they were brought to
despair in their research. Still other scientists were evidently even
brought to suicide by such disappointment. For researchers fiercely
engaged at the very frontier, the psychological stakes can be enormous.
Einstein resolved his discomfort by, as he did in his 1905 relativity
paper, turning to the postulation of two fundamental principles
(the principle of relativity in physics and the constancy of the
velocity of light in vacuo), adopting them as tools of thought.
Einstein also had a second method to bridge the unbearable differences in a theory: generalizing it,
so that the apparently differently grounded phenomena are revealed to
be coming from the same base. We know from a letter to Max von Laue of
January 17, 1952, found in the archive, that Einstein’s early concern
with the physics of fluctuation phenomena was the common root of his three great papers of 1905, on such different topics as the quantum property of light, Brownian movement, and relativity.
For researchers fiercely engaged at the very frontier, the psychological stakes can be enormous.
But
even earlier, in a letter of April 14, 1901, to his school friend
Marcel Grossmann, Einstein had revealed his generalizing approach to
physics while working on his very first published paper, on capillarity.
There, he tried to bring together in one theory the opposing behaviors
of bodies: moving upward when a liquid is in a capillary tube, but
downward when the liquid is released freely.
In that letter, he spelled out his interpenetrating emotional and scientific needs in one sentence: “It is a wonderful feeling [ein herrliches Gefühl]
to recognize the unity of a complex of appearances which, to direct
sense experiences, appear to be quite separate things.” The postulation
of universal formal principles, and the discovery among phenomena of a
unity, of Einheitlichkeit, through the generalization of
the basic theory — those were two of Einstein’s favorite weapons, as
his letters and manuscripts show. Writing to Willem de Sitter on
November 4, 1916, he confessed: “I am driven by my need to generalize [mein Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis].”
That need, that compulsion, was also deeply entrenched in German
culture and resonated with, and supported, Einstein’s approach.
Let
me just note in passing that while still a student at the Polytechnic
Institute in Zurich, in order to get his certificate to be a high school
science teacher, Einstein took optional courses on Immanuel Kant and
Goethe, whose central works he had studied since his teenage years. That
Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis was clearly a driving force behind Einstein’s career trajectory.
Thus,
he generalized from old experimental results, like Faraday’s, to arrive
at special relativity, in which he unified space and time, electric and
magnetic forces, energy and mass, and so resolved the whole long
dispute among scientists between adherence to a mechanistic versus an
electromagnetic world picture. Then he generalized the special theory to produce what he first significantly called, in an article of 1913, not the general but the generalized relativity theory. Paul Ehrenfest wrote him in puzzlement: “How far will this Verallgemeinerung go on?”
And,
finally, Einstein threw himself into the attempt of a grand unification
of quantum physics and of gravity: a unified field theory. It is an
example of an intense and perhaps unique, life-long, tenacious
dedication, despite Einstein’s failure at the very end — which
nevertheless, as a program, set the stage for the ambition of some of
today’s best scientists, who have taken over that search for the Holy
Grail of physics — a theory of everything.
So
much for trying to get a glimpse of the mind of Einstein as a
scientist. But at this point, for anyone who has studied this man’s work
and life in detail, a new thought urges itself forward. As in his
science, Einstein also lived under the compulsion to unify — in
his politics, in his social ideals, even in his everyday behavior. He
abhorred all nationalisms, and called himself, even while in Berlin
during World War I, a European.
Later, he supported the One World
movement, dreamed of a unified supernational form of government, helped
to initiate the international Pugwash movement of scientists during the
Cold War, and was as ready to befriend visiting high school students as
the Queen of the Belgians. His instinctive penchant for democracy and
dislike of hierarchy and class differences must have cost him greatly in
the early days, as when he addressed his chief professor at the Swiss
Polytechnic Institute, on whose recommendation his entrance to any
academic career would depend, not by any title, but simply as “Herr
Weber.”
And at the other end of the spectrum, in his essay on
ethics, Einstein cited Moses, Jesus, and Buddha as equally valid
prophets. No boundaries, no barriers; none in life, as there are none in
nature. Einstein’s life and his work were so mutually resonant that we
recognize both to have been carried on together in the service of one
grand project — the fusion into one coherency.
There were also no
boundaries or barriers between Einstein’s scientific and religious
feelings. After having passed from the youthful first, religious
paradise into his second, immensely productive scientific one, he found
in his middle years a fusion of those two motivations — his Third
Paradise. We had a hint of this development in his remark in 1918, in
which he observed the parallel states of feeling of the scientist and of
the “religious person.” Other hints come from the countless, well-known
quotations in which Einstein referred to God — doing it so often that
Niels Bohr had to chide him. Karl Popper remarked that in conversations
with Einstein, “I learned nothing . . . . he tended to express things in
theological terms, and this was often the only way to argue with him. I
found it finally quite uninteresting.”
There were no boundaries or barriers between Einstein’s scientific and religious feelings.
But
two other reports may point to the more profound layer of Einstein’s
deepest convictions. One is his remark to one of his assistants, Ernst
Straus: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the
creation of the world.” The second is Einstein’s reply to a curious
telegram. In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell branded Einstein’s theory
of relativity as “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about
God and His Creation,” and as implying “the ghastly apparition of
atheism.” In alarm, New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein
by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.”
In
his response, for which Einstein needed but 25 (German) words, he
stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals
Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns
Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The rabbi cited this
as evidence that Einstein was not an atheist, and further declared that
“Einstein’s theory, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring to
mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.” Einstein wisely remained
silent on that point.
The good rabbi might have had in mind the
writings of the Religion of Science movement, which had flourished in
Germany under the distinguished auspices of Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm
Ostwald, and their circle (the Monistenbund), and also in
America, chiefly in Paul Carus’s books and journals, such as “The Open
Court,” which carried the words “Devoted to the Religion of Science” on
its masthead.
If Einstein had read Carus’s book, “The Religion of
Science” (1893), he may have agreed with one sentence in it: “Scientific
truth is not profane, it is sacred.” Indeed, the charismatic view of
science in the lives of some scientists has been the subject of much
scholarly study — for example, in Joseph Ben-David’s “Scientific Growth”
(1991), and earlier in Robert K. Merton’s magisterial book of 1938,
“Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.”
In
the section entitled “The Integration of Religion and Science,” Merton
notes that among the scientists he studied, “the religious ethic,
considered as a social force, so consecrated science as to make it a
highly respected and laudable focus of attention.” The social scientist
Bernard H. Gustin elaborated on this perception, writing that science at
the highest level is charismatic because scientists devoted to such
tasks are “thought to come into contact with what is essential in the
universe.” I believe this is precisely why so many who knew little about
Einstein’s scientific writing flocked to catch a glimpse of him and to
this day feel somehow uplifted by contemplating his iconic image.
Starting
in the late 1920s, Einstein became more and more serious about
clarifying the relationship between his transcendental and his
scientific impulses. He wrote several essays on religiosity; five of
them, composed between 1930 and the early 1950s, are reproduced in his
book “Ideas and Opinions.”
In those chapters, we can watch the
result of a struggle that had its origins in his school years, as he
developed, or rather invented, a religion that offered a union with
science. In the evolution of religion, he remarked, there were three
developmental stages. At the first, “with primitive man it is above all
fear that evokes religious notions. This ‘religion of fear’. . . is in
an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly
caste” that colludes with secular authority to take advantage of it for
its own interest. The next step — “admirably illustrated in the Jewish
scriptures” — was a moral religion embodying the ethical imperative, “a
development [that] continued in the New Testament.”
Yet it had a
fatal flaw: “the anthropomorphic character of the concept of God,” easy
to grasp by “underdeveloped minds” of the masses, while freeing them of
responsibility. This flaw disappears at Einstein’s third, mature stage
of religion, to which he believed mankind is now reaching and which the
great spirits (he names Democritus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza)
had already attained — namely, the “cosmic religious feeling” that sheds
all anthropomorphic elements.
In describing the driving
motivation toward that final, highest stage, Einstein uses the same
ideas, even some of the same phrases, with which he had celebrated first
his religious and then his scientific paradise: “The individual feels
the futility of human desires, and aims at the sublimity and marvelous
order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of
thought.” “Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and
he wants to experience the universe as a single, significant whole.” Of
course! Here, as always, there has to be the intoxicating experience of
unification.
And so Einstein goes on, “I maintain that the cosmic
religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific
research . . . . A contemporary has said not unjustly that in this
materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only
profoundly religious people.” In another of his essays on religion,
Einstein points to a plausible source for his specific formulations:
“Those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of
science were all of them imbued with a truly religious conviction that
this universe of ours is something perfect, and susceptible through the
rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a
strongly emotional one, and if those searching for knowledge had not
been inspired by Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.”
“I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world.”
I believe we can guess at the first time Einstein read Baruch Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Ethica Ordinae Geometrico Demonstrata),
a system constructed on the Euclidean model of deductions from
propositions. Soon after getting his first real job at the patent
office, Einstein joined with two friends to form a discussion circle,
meeting once or twice a week in what they called, with gallows humor,
the Akademie Olympia. We know the list of books they read and
discussed. High among them, reportedly at Einstein’s suggestion, was
Spinoza’s “Ethics,” which he read afterwards several times more. Even
when his sister Maja joined him in Princeton in later life and was
confined to bed by an illness, he thought that reading a good book to
her would help, and chose Spinoza’s “Ethics” for that purpose.
By
that time, Spinoza’s work and life had long been important to Einstein.
He had written an introduction to a biography of Spinoza (by his
son-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, 1946); he had contributed to the “Spinoza
Dictionary” (1951); he had referred to Spinoza in many of his letters;
and he had even composed a poem in Spinoza’s honor. He admired Spinoza
for his independence of mind, his deterministic philosophical outlook,
his skepticism about organized religion and orthodoxy — which had
resulted in his excommunication from his synagogue in 1656 — and even
for his ascetic preference, which compelled him to remain in poverty and
solitude to live in a sort of spiritual ecstasy, instead of accepting a
professorship at the University of Heidelberg.
Originally
neglected, Spinoza’s “Ethics,” published only posthumously, profoundly
influenced other thinkers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Goethe (who called him “our common saint”), Albert
Schweitzer, and Romain Rolland (who, on reading Ethics, confessed, “I
deciphered not what he said, but what he meant to say”).
For Spinoza, God and nature were one (deus sive natura).
True religion was based not on dogma but on a feeling for the
rationality and the unity underlying all finite and temporal things, on a
feeling of wonder and awe that generates the idea of God, but a
God which lacks any anthropomorphic conception. As Spinoza wrote in
Proposition 15 in “Ethics,” he opposed assigning to God “body and soul
and being subject to passions.” Hence, “God is incorporeal” — as had
been said by others, from Maimonides on, to whom God was knowable
indirectly through His creation, through nature.
In other pages of
“Ethics,” Einstein could read Spinoza’s opposition to the idea of
cosmic purpose, and that he favored the primacy of the law of cause and
effect — an all-pervasive determinism that governs nature and life —
rather than “playing at dice,” in Einstein’s famous remark. And as if he
were merely paraphrasing Spinoza, Einstein wrote in 1929 that the
perception in the universe of “profound reason and beauty constitute
true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply
religious man.”
Much
has been written about the response of Einstein’s contemporaries to his
Spinozistic cosmic religion. For example, the physicist Arnold
Sommerfeld recorded in Schilpp’s volume that he often felt “that
Einstein stands in a particularly intimate relation to the God of
Spinoza.”
But what finally most interests us here is to what
degree Einstein, having reached his Third Paradise, in which his
yearnings for science and religion are joined, may even have found in
his own research in physics fruitful ideas emerging from that union. In
fact, there are at least some tantalizing parallels between passages in
Spinoza’s “Ethics” and Einstein’s publications in cosmology — parallels
that the physicist and philosopher Max Jammer, in his book “Einstein and
Religion” (1999), considers as amounting to intimate connections. For
example, in Part I of Ethics (“Concerning God”), Proposition 29 begins:
“In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined
from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain
manner.”
Here is at least a discernible overlap with Einstein’s
tenacious devotion to determinism and strict causality at the
fundamental level, despite all the proofs from quantum mechanics of the
reign of probabilism, at least in the subatomic realm. There are other
such parallels throughout.
But what is considered by some as the
most telling relationship between Spinoza’s Propositions and Einstein’s
physics comes from passages such as Corollary 2 of Proposition 20: “It
follows that God is immutable or, which is the same thing, all His
attributes are immutable.” In a letter of September 3, 1915, to Else
(his cousin and later his wife), Einstein, having read Spinoza’s
“Ethics” again, wrote, “I think the ‘Ethics’ will have a permanent
effect on me.” Two years later, when he expanded his general relativity
to include “cosmological considerations,” Einstein found to his dismay
that his system of equations did “not allow the hypothesis of a
spatially closed-ness of the world [raeumliche Geschlossenheit].”
How
did Einstein cure this flaw? By something he had done very rarely:
making an ad hoc addition, purely for convenience: “We can add, on the
left side of the field equation a — for the time being — unknown
universal constant, – λ.”
“The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”
In
fact, it seems that not much harm is done thereby. It does not change
the covariance; it still corresponds with the observation of motions in
the solar system (“as long as λ is small”), and so forth. Moreover, the
proposed new universal constant λ also determines the average density of
the universe with which it can remain in equilibrium, and provides the
radius and volume of a presumed spherical universe. Altogether a
beautiful, immutable universe — one an immutable God could be identified
with.
But in 1922, Alexander Friedmann showed that the equations
of general relativity did allow expansion or contraction. And in 1929,
Edwin Hubble found by astronomical observations the fact that the
universe does expand. Thus, Einstein — at least according to the
physicist George Gamow — remarked that “inserting λ was the biggest
blunder of my life.”
Max Jammer and the physicist John Wheeler,
both of whom knew Einstein, traced his unusual ad hoc insertion of λ ,
nailing down that “spatially closed-ness of the world,” to a
relationship between Einstein’s thoughts and Spinoza’s Propositions.
They also pointed to another possible reason for it: In Spinoza’s
writings, one finds the concept that God would not have made an empty
world. But in an expanding universe, in the infinity of time, the
density of matter would be diluted to zero in the limit. Space itself
would disappear, since, as Einstein put it in 1952, “On the basis of the
general theory of relativity . . . space as opposed to ‘what fills
space’. . . had no separate existence.”
Even if all of these
suggestive indications of an intellectual, emotional, and perhaps even
spiritual resonance between Einstein’s and Spinoza’s writings were left
entirely aside, there still remains Einstein’s attachment to his “cosmic
religion.” That was the end point of his own troublesome pilgrimage in
religiosity — from his early vision of his First Paradise, through his
disillusionments, to his dedication to find fundamental unity within
natural science, and at last to his recognition of science as the
devotion, in his words, of “a deeply religious unbeliever” — his final
embrace of seeming incommensurables in his Third Paradise.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint
military operation against Iran, resulting in the killing of Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei. Brookings experts break down what the ensuing war
means for Iran and what’s at stake internationally and domestically.
Suzanne Maloney
‘Khamenei raft’
In February 1979, after months of internal unrest, Iranian
newspapers announced the departure of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last
king of Iran. The massive banner headline declaring “Shah raft”
(“the Shah is gone”) quickly became iconic. That concise phrase and the
vivid image evoked the magnitude of this historical moment, at the
culmination of an unlikely popular revolution that toppled the
modernizing monarch of a wealthy, pro-Western state in a strategically
and economically vital region.
Saturday’s death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the
state that succeeded the monarchy, in an Israeli airstrike on his
compound, is no less momentous. Over the course of nearly 37 years in
power, Khamenei cemented the unique dominance of his office, thwarted
every effort to make meaningful changes to Iran’s approach to the world,
and empowered and expanded its influence across the region. For many
Iranians and others, Khamenei’s quick elimination elicited celebrations
and a rare sense of hope for the future.
Sadly, however, that hope may be short-lived. Just as the shah’s
departure failed to usher in the aspirations of the millions who rallied
in the streets during the 1979 revolution, it’s highly uncertain that
the U.S.-Israeli operation will successfully produce a real transition
to a different regime. Over the past few days, airstrikes have
powerfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities and decapitated key
political and military leadership. Still, the deeply embedded networks
and institutions that have underpinned the Islamic Republic for nearly
half a century ensure that, at least in the near term, the vestiges of
the power structure continue to hold an overwhelming advantage over any
challengers.
To regain some leverage even as the country remains under
bombardment, Tehran is deploying its time-tested strategy of escalating
strikes on its neighbors’ energy and economic infrastructure in the
hopes of creating pressure and incentives for diplomacy. After the
attrition of its proxies and its nuclear program at the hands of Israel
and the United States over the past 18 months, and then the shock of a
massive internal uprising in January, the regime saw this conflict
coming. For Iran’s battered and bloodied regime, the stakes are
existential. Imposing high costs on Washington, their neighbors, and the
global economy is their survival strategy.
Mara Karlin
High-end war, low-cost drones
The horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks triggered a series
of conflicts across the Middle East, culminating this weekend in
sweeping American and Israeli efforts to conduct regime change in Iran.
Together, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have apparently hit more than a
thousand Iranian targets in two days, demonstrating a historic joint
operation against high value political and military people and places,
and employing sophisticated conventional capabilities paired with rich
intelligence and strategic planning.
In response, the Islamic Republic has operated like there is no
tomorrow—which is plausible given the breadth, depth, and efficacy of
these attacks on its foundations. In doing so, Iranian missiles and
drones have attacked at least nine different countries as of Monday
morning, including Gulf bases where the U.S. military operates, likely
executed by devolved command and control. Iranian efforts to expand the
war have resulted in a number of countries who hoped to avoid engagement
in this conflict now being brought into the conflict. While many
Iranian missiles have been shot down, relatively low cost Iranian drones
appear to have been more effective in evading air defense and hitting
targets; further evidence that contemporary wars span the low to high end of the continuum of conflict. This latest chapter in Middle East wars looks like “everything everywhere, all at once.”
Vanda Felbab-Brown
The limits of leadership targeting
In the United States and Israel’s war against Iran, the Trump administration announced as a key goal the end of the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. But it’s provided few—and contradictory—details as to what the regime’s end means, and the new political dispensation it would find satisfactory. It merely called on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, without repeating its earlier promises of protection.
In the first days of airstrikes, the United States and Israel killed the ayatollah as well as several top leaders of the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), adding to those killed in July 2025
during the joint attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the Iranian
regime is vast, with sprawling religious authority, layers of officers
across various armed branches and militias, and widespread control of
the country’s economic assets. Even if the United States and Israel continue mowing down newly-replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and various armed forces and their economic assets will not just melt away, even if they eventually fracture.
Even a future electoral process, should a transitional regime at some
point emerge, may not lead to a sustained democratic system. Although
many people in Iran crave it, such outcomes require nurturing over many
years, including from the external intervener. Iran’s fragmented
political opposition may produce unstable governments that struggle to
satisfy the immense economic needs of the Iranian people and a clamoring
for a strongman. And that’s even if armed struggles and militancy don’t
rise, such as from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish and Baluch people or from Islamist groups.
The Trump administration broke a cruel, brutal, and dangerous regime
with little clarity, planning, readiness, and accountability for how to
foster a new, desirable replacement system. In Venezuela, it remains
satisfied with 99% of the Maduro regime staying in power, including those with egregious human rights records, and only cosmetic political liberalization, as long as the “new” regime appears to be doing U.S. oil bidding. President Donald Trump is hinting that such a minimal change of leadership in Iran may be enough for him. It hardly will be for the Iranian people or Israel.
Stephanie T. Williams
Flying blind
We are flying blind, captured by magical thinking. The United
States has launched an entirely volitional and illegal war against a
country in which it has had no diplomatic presence for nearly 50 years.
Against a theocratic dictatorship whose leader the U.S. military has now
decapitated, and who will be mourned by few, but who may well be
replaced by someone far worse. A country of 92 million people ruthlessly
ruled for decades by a corrupt cabal of armed thugs, whose tentacles
deeply penetrated what little remained of the state’s institutions.
The Trump administration has no clue and no plan for what comes next.
We can, however, draw lessons—none of them good—from the United States’
21st–century failures in regime change wars in the Middle
East and North Africa. The United States must therefore prepare for the
likelihood of Iran’s full implosion, fragmentation, and the spread of a
chaos that would make the aftermath of our misadventures in Iraq and
Libya look like a picnic. Is the Trump administration prepared to stand
by while the Middle East region is engulfed in violence? Will it
dispatch ground troops? Will it maintain an armada in the Persian Gulf?
None of this has been explained to the American people or U.S.
congressional representatives. Ironically, the greatest beneficiaries of
the United States’ grave violations of international law are the very
actors whom, under normal circumstances, Washington would be seeking to
restrain: Moscow will be emboldened to continue its barbaric assault on
Ukraine, while China will feel empowered to move on Taiwan.
Sharan Grewal
The most likely scenario is still a deal, not regime change
For Trump, the best option in Iran is still a “Venezuela
scenario”: striking a deal with whoever comes to replace Khamenei,
likely a modified nuclear deal plus some oil concessions. Trump—and
especially his MAGA base—has no interest in a long, drawn-out war in the
Middle East, which is what is required to truly topple the Iranian
regime. Especially as casualties mount—with three U.S. troops already
killed over the weekend, followed by a friendly fire downing of three jets
Monday morning—Trump is likely to abandon his earlier calls for regime
change and attempt to strike a deal. Iran, for its part, appears to be
pursuing the same strategy, expanding the war as much as and as quickly
as possible in order to create the greatest diplomatic pressure on Trump to end the war, and signaling its interest in negotiations as well.
Inside Iran, while the killing of Khamenei and other top officials
has decapitated the regime, the incentives of each element of the regime
have not meaningfully shifted. While protesters celebrated Khamenei’s
death in the streets, the regime also organized continued nationalist counterprotests
in its favor. That suggests the regime’s networks remain resilient,
and, at least as of writing, there have still been no major defections.
If so, then for Iran, all Trump’s attacks have really done is to
accelerate Khamenei’s already looming death. But the operation may have a
meaningful impact on Trump himself: Nicolás Maduro’s capture and now
Khamenei’s killing might further embolden him to continue to pursue
these reckless, unilateral military operations against heads of state
across the globe. Despite his campaign rhetoric, Trump has proven to be
even more hawkish than his predecessors, leaving future generations to
face the eventual blowback.
Steven Heydemann
The regime change gamble
Wars rarely go according to plan. In launching a war of choice
with Iran, the United States and Israel have unleashed a confrontation
that is unlikely to succeed and certain to produce unintended effects
that they will be unable to manage or contain. There is little question
that the United States and Israel can inflict serious damage on Iran’s
military capabilities. It is likely that Iran, already severely
weakened, will be unable to mount a sustained response to blistering
attacks by the United States and Israel, though it will certainly try to
inflict as much damage as it can on United States and Israeli targets
across the region.
Whether the United States will succeed in its longer-term objectives,
however, is doubtful. The Trump administration’s minimal aims can be
seen as reversing the unintended effects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
2003, the event that paved the way for the expansion of Iran’s
influence across the Arab east and reinforced its commitment to its
nuclear program. These include giving up its nuclear ambitions;
accepting limits on its missile program; abandoning its proxies in
Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and conceding its status as a regional power.
The Trump administration’s maximalist aims can be seen as reversing the
effects of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, restoring Iran’s standing as a
status quo power aligned with the West. Neither outcome is possible if
the current regime remains in power, and appeals by both Trump and
Netanyahu encouraging Iranians to rise up underscore the centrality of
regime change to the success of their plans.
Yet regime change is also the war’s central vulnerability and holds
out the most dangerous of its potential unintended consequences. Several
scenarios are possible, none of which offer any assurance that the war
will go according to plan. First, the regime may well survive the war
even if its current leadership has been killed off, paving the way for a
period of increased repression, renewed determination to restore its
deterrent capabilities, and increased use of asymmetric means to impose
costs on its enemies. After all, Hamas and Hezbollah have survived far
more devastating assaults. Iran’s regime will likely prove to be no less
resilient. Second, the regime might collapse yet be replaced by leaders
even more repressive and even less inclined to make the concessions
demanded by the United States and Israel. Or, third, regime collapse
could inaugurate a period of sustained conflict and political
instability that will be difficult to contain within Iran’s borders. In
going to war to exploit the Iranian regime’s weakness, therefore, Trump
and Netanyahu may well have set the stage for a lose-lose outcome that
will leave no one, least of all the Iranian people, better off.
Dafna H. Rand
Civilian tools, not bombs
Trump’s war of choice is unwise and potentially unlawful. It
also misaligns ends and means, like so many of Trump’s other defense and
foreign policies. If this war’s objective is to transform the Iranian
regime’s nature—rather than merely its leadership—the prioritization and
expansion of U.S. civilian tools of influence should be paramount. For
decades, the United States and its allies have supported quiet, locally
led efforts within Iran to strengthen civil society—journalists,
academics, trade unions, environmental advocates, and women’s rights
organizations. Congress has consistently funded these activities through
the Near East Regional Democracy Program, which, since its
establishment in 2009, has invested nearly $600 million in on-the-ground
initiatives.
Administrations of both parties have approached this work with
appropriate caution, given the recognition that only the Iranian people
can legitimately mobilize internal pressure for political change. U.S.
involvement in Iran’s domestic politics also carries historical baggage.
When major protests emerged—the Green Movement (2009-2010), the Dey
protests (2017-2018), and the Women, Life, Freedom movement
(2021-2022)—the United States calibrated its endorsement out of concern
that its involvement would discredit these local efforts. In retrospect,
this caution may have been excessive, and the United States should have
provided more public support.
Even so, during the peak of the Women, Life, Freedom protests,
roughly one in four Iranians used a U.S.-funded virtual private network
(VPN) to bypass heavy government censorship. In the years since, U.S.
programs—often involving partnerships with U.S. technology
companies—have developed more advanced methods that allow Iranians to
circumvent total internet shutdowns—rare events that require
technologies more sophisticated than VPNs or even satellite-based
systems, such as Starlink.
Over the past five years, U.S. policymakers added new accountability
measures and used Global Magnitsky sanctions to target Iranian officials
responsible for human rights abuses and corruption.
The United States should now expand every civilian lever of
statecraft. Policymakers should restore the State Department’s Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and associated foreign assistance
programs, including internet freedom funding. For more than a decade,
these capabilities allowed the United States to anticipate and counter
authoritarian crackdowns in the information space. They should also
rebuild the specialized teams that administer Global Magnitsky and
related sanctions so they can hold individual perpetrators of repression
and state violence accountable. Most urgently, the administration
should set aside its counterproductive tensions with the European Union,
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other
multilateral institutions. Without a U.S. presence on the ground in
Iran, Washington will need to rely on its partners to help support
opposition actors.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş
After Iran, Turkey and Israel face a reckoning
With the death of Iran’s supreme leader and the continued
U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic’s
future is suddenly much harder to predict. The regime may decline
gradually, and then suddenly. Or a narrower security elite may
consolidate power, eventually strike a deal with Washington, and
preserve the system through harsher repression at home.
One consequence, however, is already coming into view: this war is
sharpening the enmity between Turkey and Israel, pushing them closer to a
long-term collision.
That much was clear in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
initial response. He blamed Netanyahu for triggering the conflict and
condemned Israel’s strikes as “provocations,”
with no reference to the U.S. military role. Ankara wants to believe
Trump was dragged into war by an Israel determined to reshape the Middle
East.
Turkey doesn’t want another war at its doorstep and will quietly work
with the Trump administration and regime insiders to identify an
off-ramp—not out of sympathy for Tehran but because it fears the day
after. Iran and Turkey are historic rivals, and Turks have long been
nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile capabilities, and proxy
networks. But Turkish officials also feared that war would bring
prolonged instability and produce consequences worse than the status
quo—including refugee flows, trade and energy disruption, and the
possibility that turmoil inside Iran could create new space for
Kurdistan Workers’ Party-linked Kurdish autonomy inside Iran. Turkey
does not believe regime change is in the cards.
Ankara’s deeper concern, however, is geopolitical. It prefers the
Iran it knows to a postwar order shaped more decisively by Israel. In
Turkish eyes, American and Israeli aims diverge. Trump is seen as a
transactional actor who may still declare a quick victory and return to
nuclear diplomacy. Israel, by contrast, is viewed by Turks as pursuing
something broader: an ideological transformation, a fractured Iran, and a
Middle East reorganized around Israeli military primacy. That will
inevitably clash with Turkey’s own interests and quest for regional
influence.
That is why Turkey and Israel are increasingly locked into a security
dilemma, each viewing the other’s gains as a direct threat—accusing
each other of “neo-Ottomanism” and “Greater Israel” ambitions,
respectively. Their rivalry had already intensified over Gaza and Syria.
Now, the prospect of an Israel-led regional order will deepen it
further. Ankara may stay out of the war itself. But managing the rivalry
with Israel—and the diplomacy with Washington over what comes next—will
be far harder.
Kemal Kirişci
Turkey is holding its breath
Turkish leadersrepeatedly
expressed their categorical opposition to a military intervention
against Iran. Two concerns would have been at the forefront of their
minds: the potential for a mass influx of refugees and the economic
consequences.
After the current Iranian regime rose to power in 1979, an estimated 1.5 million Iranians transited
Turkey during the 1980s and early 1990s on their way to a
then-welcoming Western Europe and the United States. Today, traditional
countries of asylum have closed their doors. A case in point is the
Syrian refugees, who were overwhelmingly hosted in Turkey, Lebanon, and
Jordan. In Turkey, the government initially received them with open
arms, expecting a quick regime change in Syria and a quick return home.
This did not happen. Instead, for more than a decade, until a slow
repatriation process started with the collapse of the Assad regime in
Syria late 2024, Turkey housed
the largest refugee population in the world. Their presence—still
numbering more than 2.3 million—has taxing social, political, and
economic consequences in Turkey. This experience has unsurprisingly led
the government to build a wall along both the Syrian and Iranian borders and consider receiving refugees on the Iranian side of the border.
The Turkish economy today is not booming, in contrast to when Syrians
began to arrive in the spring of 2011. The government is following a
painful anti-inflationary policy with limited results, a policy dependent on a highly overvalued and fragile national currency. A hike in energy prices and a slowdown in the world economy would aggravate Turkey’s so far manageable
trade deficit. This could jeopardize the government’s economic policies
and weaken its capacity to resist the opposition’s persistent calls for
early national elections.
Constanze Stelzenmüller
Will Europe enter the fray?
The Iranian regime has played a nefarious role in European
security for a long time: it has supported terrorist networks, fed wars
and civil strife in the Middle East that swept streams of refugees to
Europe, and helped Russia pursue its brutal invasion of Ukraine with
Shahed drones. For Tehran, Europe was an enemy as much as Israel and the
United States.
But the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran present European governments
with a highly uncomfortable dilemma. Relief at the overthrow of a
dictatorial regime that butchered its own citizens and exported terror
is mixed with apprehension at the potential destabilizing consequences,
including in Europe—and a sharp sense of limited agency and options.
Most European governments initially responded to the aerial bombings
with calls for restraint or the respect of civilian lives and
international law.
Yet, following Iranian drone hits on British and French military bases, as well as bases in Jordan and Iraq that station German soldiers, the “E-3” (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) declared
on Sunday night: “We will take steps to defend our interests and those
of our allies in the region, potentially through enabling necessary and
proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire
missiles and drones at their source. We have agreed to work together
with the US and allies in the region on this matter.” The U.K. has agreed to let the United States use British bases; France says it will boost
its military presence in the region. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz,
who arrives in Washington on Monday, will no doubt be asked what his
repeated vow to build “the strongest army in Europe” means in this context.
Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans might do well to remember that
there is one country with four years of expertise in downing Iranian
drones: Ukraine.
Pavel K. Baev
For Russia, a major geopolitical setback with a sharp personal twist
The high probability of a U.S. attack on Iran was obvious in
Moscow, but it still came as a shock. Russia sought to discourage this
escalation by staging naval exercises with Iran, both on its own and together with China, but Trump’s “beautiful armada“
was too expensive to assemble to be deterred. From the narrow focus of
the U.S.-Iranian talks in Geneva, Russian experts deduced a limited
scope of air assault targeting primarily nuclear assets. They did not
expect the first strike to be so massive, let alone effectively eliminate Iran’s top leadership.
During the previous escalation of hostilities in June 2025, President Vladimir Putin firmly refused
to discuss the possibility of Israel or the United States targeting
Iran’s supreme leader. Last Saturday, he held an emergency meeting of
the Security Council, but not a word on the proceedings was published. His message of condolences
decried Khamenei’s “assassination” as a “cynical violation of all norms
of human morality and international law,” which rings hollow for any
researcher of the Russian way of war, but betrays his angst. Putin has
been obsessed with personal safety since the death of Libyan dictator
Moammar Gadhafi, and Putin’s long self-isolation during the COVID-19
pandemic turned it into paranoia.
How this fear would play in the U.S.-Russian-Ukrainian talks on a peace
deal, no rational analysis can tell, but it is not impossible that
Putin may discover new incentives for a compromise.
Plastic
pollution is one of the defining legacies of our modern way of life,
but it is now so widespread it is even finding its way into fruit and
vegetables as they grow.
But
they aren't just ubiquitous in water – they are spread widely in soils
on land too and can even end up in the food we eat. Unwittingly, we may
be consuming tiny fragments of plastic with almost every bite we take.
In 2022, analysis by the Environmental Working Group,
an environmental non-profit, found that sewage sludge has contaminated
almost 20 million acres (80,937sq km) of US cropland with per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called "forever chemicals",
which are commonly found in plastic products and do not break down under
normal environmental conditions.
Due to this practice, European farmland could be the biggest global reservoir of microplastics, according to a study by researchers at Cardiff University.
This means between 31,000 and 42,000 tonnes of microplastics, or 86
trillion to 710 trillion microplastic particles, contaminate European
farmland each year.
The researchers found that up to 650
million microplastic particles, measuring between 1mm and 5mm
(0.04in-0.2in), entered one wastewater treatment plant in south Wales,
in the UK, every day. All these particles ended up in the sewage sludge,
making up roughly 1% of the total weight, rather than being released
with the clean water.
The
number of microplastics that end up on farmland "is probably an
underestimation," says Catherine Wilson, one of the study's co-authors
and deputy director of the Hydro-environmental Research Centre at
Cardiff University. "Microplastics are everywhere and [often] so tiny
that we can't see them."
And microplastics can stay there for a long time too. One recent study by soil scientists at Philipps-University Marburg found microplastics up to 90cm (35in) below the surface
on two agricultural fields where sewage sludge had last been applied 34
years ago. Ploughing also caused the plastic to spread into areas where
the sludge had not been applied.
The microplastics' concentration on farmland soils in Europe is similar to the amount found in ocean surface waters, says James Lofty, the lead author of the Cardiff study and a PhD research student at the Hydro-environmental Research Centre.
The
UK has some of the highest concentrations of microplastics in Europe,
with between 500 and 1,000 microplastic particles are spread on farmland
there each year, according to Wilson and Lofty's research.
As
well as creating a large reservoir of microplastics on land, the
practice of using sewage sludge as fertiliser is also exacerbating the
plastics crisis in our oceans, adds Lofty. Eventually the microplastics
will end up in waterways, as rain washes the top layer of soil into
rivers or washes them into groundwater. "The major source of [plastic]
contamination in our rivers and oceans is from runoff," he says.
One study by researchers in Ontario, Canada, found that 99% of microplastics were transported away from where the sludge was initially dumped into aquatic environments.
Environmental contamination
Before
they are washed away, however, microplastics can leach toxic chemicals
into the soil. Not only are they made from potentially harmful chemicals
that can be released into the environment as they break down,
microplastics can also absorb other toxic substances, essentially allowing them to hitch a ride onto agricultural land where they can leach into the soil, according to Lofty.
A 2020 experiment by Kansas University agronomist Mary Beth Kirkham found that plastic serves as a vector for plant uptake of toxic chemicals
such as cadmium. "In the plants where cadmium was in the soil with
plastic, the wheat leaves had much, much more cadmium than in the plants
that grew without plastic in the soil," Kirkham said at the time.
Research also shows that microplastics can stunt the growth of earthworms
and cause them to lose weight. The reasons for this weight loss aren't
fully understood, but one theory is that microplastics may obstructs
earthworms' digestive tracts, limiting their ability to absorb nutrients
and so limiting their growth. This has a negative impact on the wider
environment, too, the researchers say, as earthworms play a vital role
in maintaining soil health. Their burrowing activity aerates the soil,
prevents erosion, improves water drainage and recycles nutrients.
Plastic particles can also contaminate food crops directly. A 2020 study found microplastics and nanoplastics in fruit and vegetables
sold by supermarkets and in produce sold by local sellers in Catania in
Sicily, Italy. Apples were the most contaminated fruit, and carrots had
the highest levels of microplastics among the sampled vegetables.
According
to research by Willie Peijnenburg, professor of environmental
toxicology and biodiversity at Leiden University in the Netherlands,
crops absorb nanoplastic particles – minuscule fragments measuring
between 1-100nm in size, or about 1,000 to 100 times smaller than a
human blood cell – from surrounding water and soil through tiny cracks in their roots.
Analysis revealed that most of the plastics accumulated in the plant roots,
with only a very small amount travelling up to the shoots.
"Concentrations in the leaves are well below 1%," says Peijnenburg. For
leafy vegetables such as lettuces and cabbage, the concentrations of
plastic would likely then be relatively low, but for root vegetables
such as carrots, radishes and turnips, the risk of consuming
microplastics would be greater, he warns.
Another study by Peijnenburg and his colleagues found that in both lettuce and wheat, the concentration of microplastics was 10 times lower
than in the surrounding soil. "We found that only the smallest
particles are taken up by the plants and the big ones are not," says
Peijnenburg.
This is reassuring, says
Peijnenburg. However, many microplastics will slowly degrade and break
down into nanoparticles, providing a "good source for plant uptake," he
adds.
It will take decades before plastics are fully removed from the environment – Willie Peijnenburg
The
uptake of the plastic particles did not seem to stunt the growth of the
crops, according to Peijnenburg's research. But what effect this
accumulation of plastic in our food has on our own health is less clear.
Further research is needed to understand this, says Peijnenburg, especially as the problem will only get bigger.
"It will take decades before plastics
are fully removed from the environment," he says. "Even if the risk is
currently not very high, it's not a good idea to have persistent
chemicals [on farmland]. They will pile up and then they might form a
risk."
Health impacts
While
the impact of ingesting plastics on human health is not yet fully
understood, there is already some research that suggests it could be
harmful. Studies show that chemicals added during the production of
plastics can disrupt the endocrine system and the hormones that regulate our growth and development.
The
researchers reviewed 17 previous studies which looked at the
toxicological impact of microplastics on human cells. The analysis
compared the amount of microplastics that caused damage to cells in
laboratory tests with the levels ingested by people through drinking water, seafood and salt.
It found that the amounts being ingested approached those that could
trigger cell death, but could also cause immune responses, including
allergic reactions, damage to cell walls, and oxidative stress.
Our research shows that we are ingesting microplastics at the levels
consistent with harmful effects on cells, which are in many cases the
initiating event for health effects," says Evangelos Danopoulos, lead
author of the study and a researcher at Hull York Medical School. "We
know that microplastics can cross the barriers of cells and also break
them, We know they can also cause oxidative stress on cells, which is
the start of tissue damage."
There are two theories as to how
microplastics lead to cell breakdown, says Danopoulos. Their sharp edges
could rupture the cell wall or the chemicals in the microplastics could
damage the cell, he says. The study found that irregularly-shaped
microplastics were the most likely to cause cell death.
"What
we now need to understand is how many microplastics remain in our body
and what kind of size and shape is able to cross the cell barrier," says
Danopoulos. If plastics were to accumulate to the levels at which they
could become harmful over a period of time, this could pose an even
greater risk to human health.
But
even without these answers, Danopoulos questions whether more care is
needed to ensure microplastics do not enter the food chain. "If we know
that sludge is contaminated with microplastics and that plants have the
ability to extract them from the soil, should we be using it as
fertiliser?" he says.
Banning sewage sludge
Spreading sludge on farmland has been banned in the Netherlands since 1995. The country initially incinerated the sludge, but started exporting it to the UK, where it was used as fertiliser on farmland, after problems at an Amsterdam incineration plant.
Switzerland prohibited the use of sewage sludge
as fertiliser in 2003 because it "comprises a whole range of harmful
substances and pathogenic organisms produced by industry and private
households". The US state Maine also banned the practice in April 2022
after environmental authorities found high levels of PFAS on farmland
soil, crops and water. High PFAS levels were also detected in farmers'
blood. The widespread contamination forced several farms to close.
The
new Maine law bans the application, sale and distribution of compost
containing sewage sludge, but does not forbid it from being exported.
But
a total ban on using sewage sludge as fertiliser is not necessarily the
best solution, says Cardiff University's Wilson. Instead, it could
incentivise farmers to use more synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, made
from natural gas, she says.
"[With sewage sludge], we're using a
waste product in an efficient way, rather than producing endless fossil
fuel fertilisers," says Wilson. The organic waste in sludge also helps
return carbon to the soil and enriches it with nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which prevents soil degradation, she says.
Microplastics are now on the cusp of changing from a contaminant to a pollutant – Evangelos Danopoulos
"We
need to quantify the microplastics in sewage sludge so that we can
[determine] where the hot spots are and start managing it," says Wilson.
In places with high levels of microplastics, sewage sludge could be
incinerated to generate energy instead of used as fertiliser, she
suggests. One way to prevent the contamination of farmland is to recover
fats, oil and grease (which contain high levels of microplastics) at
wastewater treatment plants and use this "surface scum" as biofuel,
instead of mixing it with sludge, Wilson and her colleagues say.
Some
European countries, such as Italy and Greece, dispose of sewage sludge
in landfill sites, the researchers note, but they warn that there is a
risk of microplastics leaching into the environment from these sites and
contaminating surrounding land and water bodies.
Both
Wilson and Danopoulos say much more research is needed to quantify the
amount of microplastics on farmland and the possible environmental and
health impacts.
"Microplastics are now on the cusp of changing from a contaminant to a
pollutant," says Danopoulos. "A contaminant is something that is found
where it shouldn't be. Microplastics shouldn't be in our water and soil.
If we prove that [they have] adverse effects, that would make them a
pollutant and [we] would have to bring in legislation and regulations."
