Reason #345654 Why Your Life is Worthless
Published on October 29, 2007 by Daniel Taylor · 15 Comments
All the shit you throw away — grocery bags, cd cases, water bottles, toys, iPods — ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a heap of debris floating in the Pacific twice the size of Texas, consisting of 80 percent plastics and weighing some 3.5 million tons, and floating where few people ever travel, in no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.”The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
If you want to feel really bad about it, read always-genius Mark Morford’s take on it here. You see, its not just killing fish and turtles and bird, but it’s killing us too!
The poetry goes something like this: Plastic bottle is tossed away. Plastic bottle, along with millions just like it, escapes out to sea, drifts and wanders and ultimately joins giant toxic stew of other plastic garbage sitting like a massive island in middle of impartial but increasingly wary ocean.
Time passes. Life churns. Sea birds and other large marine life ingest (and then die from) some of the billions of bits of brightly-colored plastic floating about, as the sun slowly breaks down the rest of the plastic bottle into its fundamental, ultra-toxic polymer molecules. Stew thickens.
And then, the magic happens. Nature’s most efficient organic filters, the sea jellies, absorb those tiny plastic molecules into their bodies. Small fish eat the jellies. Larger fish eat the smaller fish. Slowly, the deadly plastics, which never completely biodegrade, amble their way back up the food chain and back into the stomachs and bloodstreams and ecosystems of larger and larger animals until, voila, there again is your plastic bottle, right there on your dinner plate. Neat!
Tags: Death, FTW, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, ocean, plastic, pollution
Readers Comments (15)
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and yet no one has pictures of this supposed behemoth that is twice the size of Texas
Yes, I’m looking for a picture too??? Should be obvious from a satalite. So much discussion. but not a one overhead picture.. I hear the size claimed from texas to as bigger than U.S. And then i see the same photo of a bird with garbage stuck in its stomach….I go fishing often and observe birds and not once have i seen one eat a piece of plastic and in fact never seen any animal accidentally eat non food… there pretty smart. I agree that we need to control pollution and our waste but when there is a band wagon of comments such as “All the shit you throw away — grocery bags, cd cases, water bottles, toys, iPods — ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage” I have to say “Excuse Me My garbage went to a land fill and will never make it to the ocean” all the environmental exaggeration and non scientific extrapolation and propaganda makes me not want to listen to any of it. I do remember in the 70′s being told about the iminant Ice age.
If daniel thinks that life is worthless maybe he should do something about it and stop using our resources(like air) so that the rest of us who feel we are worthy can use those resources.
See the ignorance of people, “if theres no picture of it then it must not exist”, or,” my trash went to a landfill!”
I guess all the trash and plastics and cancer causing chemicals we put into our environment every day will have no effect on us at all, right? Thats why cancer rates are higher than in mankinds history, no connection at all right? Well I guess it will all take care of itself some way, so just go on with your disposable life and pretend it has no effect at all! Mankinds downfall will be his ignorance, greed, and vanity! When man is gone the animals can have the earth back (or whats left of it) at least they know how to take care of it!
well john like i said “I agree that we need to control pollution and our waste ” but just like my health if some one says ” this pill will make you better” i ask wheres the proof before i blindly take it. And my point is just it is hard to take certain “green activists” (or whatever you want to call them,you) seriously when the spew miss information and claims.
i also don’t pretend that our society is not contributing to the destruction of our environment and that we should not make changes to our lifestyles. But we need to be practical about the changes we make and use science that is verifiable and realistic to come up with real choices.
for example in our area the “green activists” essentially pressured the local government to shut down local logging……great except that local logging in this area used local labor to harvest a fast growing high quality highly renewable resource (redwood trees) in a very responsible manner which was then transported locally to a local company that sold it locally to be used by local people to provide homes for local people and ultimately will be recycled locally..along with reducing fire danger and improving forest health….this would seem to be the appitimy of “green living” yet the greenies stopped it….and the alternative they provided was ????? well i guess we should be importing from some other place at a greater waste of resources and i am going to guess that these greenies probably all live in wood homes….. do they/you have responsible real choices as alternatives? And any real proof that what they have stopped was not earth friendly?
talk about real science and real practical solutions and paths and i will listen…shout about half truths and fuzzy science and you loose me and a lot others
I just today read some more “news” about plastic in the ocean… I want to listen but this new “news” was just a rehash of an earlier article about what “scientist found” but the article like the ones that came before it say nothing about the actual experiments, study method, scientist qualifications,variables or anything at all about how the conclusions were made…and these articles rarely if ever have been published in scientific journals where peer review would allow me to take the article more seriously.
Again as in my health, i want serious scientific study to back up what are often serious and far reaching “conclusions”
guys chill.
the reason why you cant see this “massive island of trash one can walk accross” is because of photodegradation. The patch is largely composed of tiny tiny plastic parts broken up by the sun that originally came from bigger plastic items.
They also don’t float on the surface either…. they can range from a few to a few hundred meters below the surface. This also makes it hard to see with the naked eye.
Imagine it as a patch…. not a full-on island LOL.
point me to the science
your just propogating something you heard
show me the science otherwise quit spreading this myth
James, if you are looking for proof you can read the San Francisco Chronicle published on October 30th and the followup on November 15, 2007. If an established and respected newspaper does not provide enough proof for you, then please continue to do your own research, and not just ignore the problem.
Corina, read those two articles and what you find is Mr Moore is the only one claiming this and if you research Mr Moores research you find ZIP for any real scientific study. You know research that has numbers, control groups, charts,tests ,documentation etc. He makes many claims>
and you can see also from the articles that yes scientist do believe we need to address and look at and understand the relationship between our plastic and the ocean . My point is i consider this propaganda and i dont respect that even if its for good intentions.
Oh and no.. just because a newspaper/news media has an article doesn’t mean that it is providing us with valid information. this is a rehashed nearly verbatim article that has surface every 6 months for several years now. And is based entirely on Mr Moores web site article.
my father was a writer for newspapers and he told me that i need to get news and information from at least two sources and preferably 3-5 that agree before i make any conclusions. He told me that if there is only one source it is nearly always false.
I have done my research and have concluded I should do my part to recycle and reduce use of plastic but i feel OK about ignoring “the problem” of a garbage patch in the ocean
James,
What I am most distrubed about in your comments is that you “disprove” others comments but offer no sources yourself. You say no one does their research but you have obviously not done yours. First of all, the fact that you don’t believe marine life ingests plastics is ridiculous. There have been studies dating back to the 80′s about this and it is pretty well accepted in the science community that this happens. The “fact” (I use that term loosely as not to offend you) that plastic does accumulate and degrade in the north pacific has also been extensively studied. For more information, look up the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Marine Debris (1989). A wealth of scientific papers NOT by Moore is offered here. The paper “Marine Birds and Plastic Pollution” by M.Y. Azzarello and E.S. Van Vleet in “Marine Ecology” also offers an easy to read scientific study of the effect on sea birds… and they don’t cite Moore. As for why a satellite photo cannot be taken, I suggest you look up surveys of size distributions of marine plastics. Aerial photos do not offer good evidence as to the expanse of the garbage because the vast majority of the plastic is in its photodegraded and weathered pellet form. In addition, the densities of many of the plastics relative the ocean mean that a vast majority of the debris is sub-surface. (Ideas alluded to be “newbs”) As newbs said, the “patch” is not an island. They consider it one entity simply because of the geographic location of the gyre and the relatively steady density of plastic per cubic foot, yard, etc. (whatever the particularly study happens to be measuring). The only way to determine the size of the patch is through estimation due to the expanse, difficulty of satellite imagery, and mobility of the gyre. This said, I can’t say whether Moore’s estimation of the size is accurate (I’m not aware of any study that has been done to specifically measure the size), but I can say that plastic marine debris is a problem and it is bigger than “twice the size of the US!” There are marine debris issues in other locations besides the North Pacific Gyre. These patches are different from each other in density and size but stem from the same problem. It is also scientifically proven (and I’m okay with making the strong assertion here) that marine plastics due harm ocean life. So before you accuse people of not doing their research, please do some research yourself.
Thank you to Jenna.
To the other, shall I say “blind” people, what would be the motivation for making this up?
My bad… the only dissenting person in this thread is james.
well thanks jenna i will look at those references you gave. And i am more than willing to be educated and understand the conditions and issues. And i dont imply that i have any proof for any thing i say.
My point is i dont like when great stories are created and everyone gets talking about stories that dont have some type of factual verifiable studies to support them such as the moore stories. And my limited research has not revealed to me the kind of studies to support the claims. and in fact revealed a claim regurgitated many times over from the same unsupported information. good intentions does not make it right to spread exaggerated or unsupported claims…. it diminishes the movement to me.
One analogy i could think of is Iraq has Weapons of Mass destruction so lets spend billions of dollars and lives to stop them or correct the situation…….There may be a lot of good reasons to start a war and ultimately the results may be good but dont BS me so as to sucker my support because i now have no faith in anything you say…. true, supported or not
Again though jenna i will look up your references , and let me point out that of several discussions and threads on this topic you are the first to come forward with a reference. which indicated that the 100′s of other people in these groups are just following along blindly and not questioning our sources which i believe we must always do
and you know what i hope one day we are swimming in nothing but an endless ocean of trash!!!
james, the lie about the WMDs in Iraq is not a good analogy in this discussion. There was an obvious motive for the Bush/Cheney cabal to invade Iraq that had nothing to do with a threat to the United States. Greed motivates many. As someone else noted, what would be the motive for lying about the plastic garbage in the ocean? Being cautious about accepting information is one thing, but denying reality is quite another.
Got to agree with James – where’s the proof? Also, regarding rising cancer rates – as a public policy analyst I have to tell you that the main reason cancer rates are rising is that people in the West aren’t dying from things like measles, malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis, any more. However, if you don’t die, you get old and then eventually die of something – often cancer, which gets more likely as you get older.
For the extended lifespan which has caused this ‘rise’ in cancer rates, you can thank modern science, medicine, progress, capitalism, globalisation and all the other things you lot blame for everything.
Like, if we all lived in teepees and ate organic couscous we’d all live forever, maaaaan.