Plastic Soup
Sadly, the truth is that as a species capable of thinking, capable of understanding and realizing how what we do may impact in many ways that may be deleterious to our existence, we still behave in self-destructive ways. Our reasoning capabilities simply are not sufficiently attuned to a kind of intelligence that is capable of overcoming our emotions. We are, as a race, fractious, acquisitive and ferociously stupid.We covet everything, and take responsibility for nothing. We live to consume, whether it is more food than we require to sustain life, or territory we have no real claim to, or natural resources that we then waste. The very act of consuming seems to satisfy in us all the reason for existence. That rabid need to consume has led us to all that is least attractive in human existence, exploiting the land, exploiting and warring on one another, bloating ourselves into caricatures.
We are greedy and self-availing, dissatisfied with enough, always striving to achieve ownership of excess. Our debilitating sense of entitlement to acquire and keep acquiring presents as a real conundrum. All the more so when we are loathe to share. And then we end up with the realization that wars are horrendous, basic human rights should enrich everyone's lives, and this world which is our only home deserves better than the trashing it receives from its creatures on a daily basis.
It is no less than horrendous to know that our vast oceans are despoiled by the garbage that human beings strew everywhere, on the land and on the high seas. Our world has become one gigantic dump. There are vast floating islands of rubbish that collect in areas in the Pacific, as huge waste collection areas that bob on the ocean, and gradually decompose into a slurry of detritus.
Between California and Hawaii lies 60 years of growing waste called the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", replete with plastic bags, bottles, shoes, toys, tires, cans, plastic swimming pools and everything in between. Some 800 kilometres off the California coast an area known as the "plastic vortex" represents the world's largest heap of rubbish
The area is a huge system of rotating current, called a gyre, one of five such major oceanic areas, which draw in waste from thousands of kilometres' distance. It is not only from North America that these waste items are drawn from, for many of the plastic items are stamped with their country of origin; China and Japan among them. Of course though they are manufactured elsewhere, they make their way to consumers in North America.
They comprise a soup of broken, abused and discarded debris that society thinks nothing of once they've rejected those items. And the resulting mash is full of toxic chemicals, while the broken pieces of plastic are being eaten by the fish of the high seas. Those are the fish that human beings eat. And the chemicals that reside in those fish will make their way into the human food chain.
Labels: Environment, Nature, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 08, 2010
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