Garbage Patch, Kids!

Dear children of the earth, 

Your ancestors, in their wisdom created a substance, in the early part of the twentieth century, that was thought to be of GREAT BENEFIT to humankind. Starting with petroleum, they baked, boiled, tweaked, and added to the oil many chemicals, and created PLASTIC, so called because it could be molded into just about any form, and into thicknesses varying from film as fine as hair, to inches or even feet thick. 

PLASTIC has been a great boon to many industries. The medical, dental, car manufacturing, toy, gizmo, gadget, and container industries have blossomed thanks to PLASTIC. What would we do without it?

Kids, it's time to experiment with doing without it. Turns out, there is a catch. A big one.

Here is an apology, kids. Your elders, including me, have left you with an unsustainable and poisonous industry. 

If one subscribes to the theory of physics that matter is neither created nor destroyed, then there would have to be intelligent life on other worlds to make up for the relentless loss of intelligent life on our own.  

Duh! Oops!

We GOOFED! We did not factor in that PLASTIC does NOT biodegrade. It never breaks down entirely, but rather breaks into smaller and smaller bits over tens of decades to become more and more insidious in its capacity to destroy life. There is no “away” to throw it, and, as far as we know, it will be here forever, leaving you with fewer building blocks of matter to construct your future.

We’ve let you down, Children of Mother Earth. We’ve turned so much of our dear Mater (matter) into PLASTIC, that before we know it, the whole world will be made of it!

Currently, there is a Garbage Patch, caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, smack dab in the middle of the ocean, between the East coast of Japan, and the West coast of California. It is 1300 miles from the nearest city. Nearby is remote Midway Island that once was a pristine paradise. It is still home to the largest population of a specific species of Albatross: half a million nests and one and a half million birds populate these atolls of Midway.

A very small population of scientists and environmentalist researchers also live on Midway. What they are uncovering is the horrific downside to the use of ubiquitous PLASTICS by our convenience-oriented first world folks. There are over five trillion pieces of plastic, not counting the microscopic, ranging in size from tiny fragments to bath-tub size pieces. Fishing nets, toys, bags, bottles, bottle caps, shoes, dash boards from cars, dishpans, ice chests, furniture, styrofoam packing materials, and containers of every size for everything you could imagine can be found here - washed up on the (formerly) white sand beaches. Out in the ocean beyond the coral reefs ringing Midway, and just below the surface floats the mass of clumped together PLASTIC garbage. Estimates of its size range from the size of the state of Texas to bigger than the entire continental United States. Difficult to measure, it is growing daily.

The health of our oceans determines the health of our planet. The Albatrosses of Midway are like canaries in the coal mine. Children, we’re in deep doo-doo. Our planet is very sick. Parent birds pick-up from the ocean what looks like food to them and feed it to their chicks. The chicks die in droves. Midway Island stinks of death as the corpses of dead Albatross chicks putrefy in the sun. When autopsied, the contents of their stomachs show death by PLASTICS that cannot be digested and which are toxic themselves, but also gather other ocean toxins to them. 

There are bits of PLASTIC in every marine animal on the planet from coral to dolphins, from eels to seals, world wide. The Garbage Patch of the North Pacific Gyre is not the only garbage patch, kids.

I’m scared for you children. 

Perhaps your wonderful minds can invent ways to take spent PLASTIC down to its  elemental constituents and return it to an inert and non-toxic state of matter. I hope your minds can do that.

It matters.

Good luck, kids.

Love,

One of your ancestors

PS: I'm concocting ways to go on a plastic diet. By using "single use plastic bags" until they are no longer useable, and then taking them to my local recycling center, where they are shipped to China to be made into plastic lumber, and by buying in bulk and using fabric bags I've made out of nylon, and going to farmer's markets where I can buy things not wrapped in plastic, and placing left-over apple, avocado, or citrus halves cut-side-down on a plate, rather than wrapping them in plastic, and by using wax-paper bags and glass containers instead of plastic bags for snacks and sandwiches, I'm experimenting with how little plastic I can come in contact with in one day. I'd love to hear from you, kids and your adults too, how you imagine supporting a plastic moratorium. Maybe we can do this together, eh?