(continued from above)
Lee Smolin represents a very large group of "realist" physicists and philosophers. They have no physics that can account for a situation in which we (and other living things) can intervene and change the world. So their views logically imply that, because we have never, and can never, intervene and change the world, it is the pure and unaided unfolding of laws of nature that caused plastics to litter the planet, damaging wildlife and ecosystems.
Lee Smolin, and all of us, have acquired "higher-level" [2] knowledge of the world, and yet there is no physics that can account for higher-level knowledge; and there is no physics that can link this acquired higher-level knowledge to outcomes in the world - according to physics the only possible outcomes are those determined by laws of nature. So, according to Smolin's view of the world, we can't intervene and make genuine changes to reality (e.g. to avert climate change, and clean up plastic pollution), we just have to hope that the laws of nature, which are based on "lower-level" information, and have no connection to higher-level knowledge of the situation, will somehow fix the problem.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zri9gS1w5ok , quote starting at approximately 19 minutes in.
2. https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3255#post_150459