Come see our giant toxic stew!
1,500 miles wide, floating in the Pacific, made of all your plastic crap. Bring the kids!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, October 26, 2007
Because nothing makes you feel better about being a living, breathing, plastic-licking human on this planet today than the thought of a massive, eternal, slowly swirling vortex of noxious garbage the size of a continent and the shape of death itself, just floating out there in the middle of the Pacific ocean, mocking life, humanity, God. Mmm, gloomy.
Have you heard? Did you see? It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Pacific Trash Vortex, among other awesome nicknames) and it's a staggering phenomenon indeed and after reading up on it, I fully believe we must now revise our master list. Because surely this thing must be one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the grand sociocultural melting pot of our time. Except for the fact that it's, you know, revolting.
Is it not true? Is there anything more impressive than the idea that you can, say, toss away your little Calistoga bottle or your plastic Safeway bag or your meth syringe or old iPod case or cigarette lighter or DVD wrapper here, and it will somehow, through a miraculous combination of time and wind and wastefulness and the flow of nature's beautiful eternal pulsing rhythms, wend its way 1,000 miles out to sea and then, well, just swirl around, slowly breaking apart and poisoning all life surrounding it and joining with the mountains of other plastic crap spewed out from our friends and enemies and neighboring nations worldwide? Is this not, in its way, profoundly moving? You bet it is.
But oh holy hell, it certainly is impressive. At least 1,500 miles wide (give or take, could be much larger, no one's quite sure because it's a bit difficult to measure), 30 meters deep, 80 percent plastic, and 100 percent appalling. Truly, there is nothing else quite like it on Earth.
Oh sure, we've all heard about the epic heaps of garbage we pack away on land, those reeking gaseous toxic rat-infested landfills the size of the Grand Canyon that dot our landscape like the devil's own acne, so poisonous and so foul and so deadly to all life that we have to find holes miles away from human life just to make it bearable.
The rest is here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2007/10/26/notes102607.DTL
Posts
2 years ago
It’s raining outside and I have the day off of work, so I felt like perusing this forum, otherwise I would probably not do so. I read Janisse Ray’s article awhile ago, so I only remember the gist of the piece. After reading this entire comment section it was clear to me that these comment sections always seem to start so sweetly, with people’s general reactions to the articles, and then degenerate into extremely long missives from those with way too much time on their hands. It is disheartening.
I like writing, though, and reading as well, but obviously the proof is in the pudding. You can say any stupid outrageous intelligent brilliant thing you want, and it just doesn’t matter until an action is taken on behalf of the words you write or the thoughts you think. I think most people inherently know this. So why so much baloney in these forums, comment sections, and listservs? What a waste of energy. And the only way to save the world is to save energy, right?
So my particular response to this article and others like it is one of irritation at the actual smallness of the subject, that we are discussing such ridiculously small problems that can be solved quite easily if anybody actually cared. I’m not saying that people don’t, I’m saying it seems like people don’t. Industrialized people, anyway.
In all actuality, you do not have to drive anywhere or use the internet or buy disposable razor blades from Target or shower every day (I do because I’m a landscaper..:)but we all choose to do one or more stupid things every day because we have been programmed since we were infants to feel like these consumerist actions are what makes us happy, they are what makes us human almost! Good gracious, how could we relax after work without a movie and some popcorn? How could we have a good Christmas without a ham and the newest video game system? Our consumption of junk and apathy towards the earth is what fuels our rampant wasting of many different types of energy. Too me, looking around at our culture, is shocking and amazing. But of course, I can only change myself, so I try to do that in small steps. I don’t succeed all the time, but so what?
Permaculture is one system that will allow human beings to live fully and deliciously on this planet. There are other systems, but there are no technological fixes left when the nonrenewable resources that fuel the machine become too expensive to mine, or runs out. In any case, the small fragment of humanity that makes up the industrialized nations will probably have live like the other three fourths of the world. That’s the real picture of the future, not this desperate clinging of the bourgeoisie to the last vestiges of the middle class suburban lifestyle of comfort and waste.
I’m a country boy living in the big city and I really appreciate both worlds, but the city isn’t sustainable in the long run in my view, at least in the urban centers. But I do not think that a retreat to the country to live a back-to-the-land lifestyle is sustainable either. Basically the city and the country mirror each other, and a million possible permutations exist across the world. I think that as an individual, it is up to me to find and build a community that is sustainable. That is all I can do and any more thought on the subject seems counterproductive and intellectually smug.
There was a particular idea that popped up in this forum, about how the BIG QUESTION was CAN IT SCALE, or something like that. I have gotten that question from any number of intelligent people as a response to my ideas about permaculture and sustainability. I want to say, YES! Of course it can scale. But nobody has tried it, so how the hell do we know for sure? What a ridiculous question, in some ways. Is a small garden less important because it can’t be recreated on giant scale? I honestly don’t even know where people’s heads are at when they ask this question...How has our present system of intensive monocropping been anything but bad? For us and for the earth? We’re fatter and the earth is sicker.
Saying you’re an environmentalist or selling a green or eco product means nothing anymore. The word “organic” has been co-opted and now costs farmers thousands of dollar just to be able to use it. All that counts is every little thing you do. One commentator said that a movement that asks you to consider every action you take wouldn’t attract many people, or something to that effect, but look at Buddhism. It’s pretty popular. And in an case, that is all we can do as humans, otherwise we’re just blindly passing though life into death, ruled by our passions, fears, and ignorance.
Namaste