There are a few exceptions to this rule however. For example saponins. One of the most common plant poisons in the natural world that might kill your dog. If you ever read an ethnobotany piece and it mentions that a certain plant is used to kill fish in a pond, it's likely a saponin-rich plant (which also means it's likely to be good to make soap out of). But since these compounds are so common humans have evolved specific enzymes to break this down and they leave us mostly unaffected (indeed some have even been turned into important drugs).

It's kinda like lignin. When wood first evolved, there was nothing that could break it down. And for thousands of years the world was "littered" with wood from dead trees until fungi finally learned how to break it down. I'd say plastics might be the next lignin as we see more and more organisms already learning to break it down, but there are too many different types of plastics that I doubt all of them could be broken down

I think the point I'm trying to make is that the "toxicity" of a chemical or compound is often in proportion to how much time the rest of the ecosystem has had to evolve a way to deal with it

I like this theory very much!

But there was also thread here on news.ycombinator about a paper which says that this theory is not entirely true.

I can't recall the paper. I think, paper said "the lignin breakdown by fungi" was already invented. The abundance of dead wood (which became coal) is described by existence of wast marshes.

I'm sorry without link is my text not valid very much. Maybe someone could find the paper and link it here.

> A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated. Here, we reject this evolutionary lag hypothesis, based on assessment of phylogenomic, geochemical, paleontological, and stratigraphic evidence.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113#:~:text=The...

Very interesting, thanks so much for the link!

It is a very cool long-term view of our current environmental degradation, whether or not it plays out.

I just love the idea of a Earth in the far future, where the huge pile of plastic rubbish left by humans is rotting like an old log.

We might have inadvertently created an enormous pile of fertilizer for a new world :-)

Wonder if it'll degrade to something oil like? :)

Right but our entire infrastructure has been built to resist that. Most likely it'll happen at a slow enough pace that we could adapt, but just imagine if soil fungi could suddenly eat PVC pipes

Most traditional architectural techniques didn't try to resist rot so much as plan around it. I.e. have the structural integrity so that you could take out and replace parts of the building without the whole thing coming down. It's why Japanese temples are the oldest standing buildings around today

I imagine we'll have to relearn some of those lessons at some point

I think a lot about this. How on a geological timescale, most of our rubbish will be compressed down to a layer of oil with a bunch of increasingly heavy metals and radioactive isotopes towards the bottom. It'll be a rich vein for building a civilization for whoever comes along in half a billion years. (My bet is on the octopus).

I must have had especially stupid rodent problems, because they sure weren't smart enough to avoid traps. Not even the rats.

Darwin agrees. I've watched live how this goes with a young family of rats. The first 2 got caught in the trap and the others were already pretty scared off by the closing mechanism kicking in. Left it like that for a couple of minutes, then I put the caught ones somewhere else then reinstalled the trap. The next 3 nor the mother came anywhere near the trap. Not even after moving it to a different location, nor with different types of food inside, nor with a different trap with a somewhat different shape.

On the odd occasion they’d get mice in the house, my parents living in Melbourne had difficulty would have difficulty getting rid of them.

Five years ago I moved out into a tiny rural town, and saw and heard mice very regularly (the house’s previous owner had only been around every couple of weeks). But I haven’t had the slightest difficulty in slaying them: I put a couple of traps in areas I’d seen mice traversing, and was catching them within hours, occasionally as much as a day or two, from hearing or seeing evidence of the mouse. (And if I saw one, I’d give it a verbal warning to flee for its life. Don’t know if any heeded it.) Within a few days I stopped even bothering with bait. In that first year, I lost count somewhere around fifty. Each year the number has dropped. This year, I’ve had only one since last autumn (it’s now mid-summer), slain before I even saw or heard it.

Anyway, we decided (lightheartedly) that it must be the difference between town mouse and country mouse.¹

¹ See Aesop’s fables, if you’re not familiar with the expression.