no peanuts in church…

One word, kid… “Plastics!”

Gene Wolfe in 1988, putting on his Engineer Hat with this rather prescient thought…

Wolfe: There are more than two paths we can head down. I feel both optimistic and pessimistic about what we’ve been doing with technology. As you say, it has already been used to produce both wonderful and terrible things. The greatest ecological disaster to yet hit this planet has come from technology—the invention of plastics. (If I could go back into the past and repeal a single discovery of mankind’s it would be the discovery of plastics.) 

Full interview is here. Most of it is, of course, about his writing, but that was the quote that most jumped out at me for some reason.