I am completely over human beings. I want to report something good but the bad news just keeps on coming. The latest is the (old) news that there is an enormous patch of rubbish floating in the Pacific. The news report said that it might be as big as South Australia and New South Wales put together. I am utterly disgusted.The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also called the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a ‘gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean’. Some scientists say it is as big as Texas, or maybe even as large as the US. It is made up of ‘pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that has been trapped by the currents’. Unfortunately it is not visible by satellite.
It’s existence was predicted in a 1988 paper published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Charles J. Moore found the mess in 1997 when he was ‘returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpac sailing race’No need to elaborate on what this is doing to the wildlife. A similar patch can be found in the Atlantic Ocean.
What got my attention today on ABC 24 was David Mayer de Rothschild sailing into Sydney in his Plastiki, a ‘turbine-powered catamaran’ constructed from ‘12,000 plastic bottles full of carbon dioxide’ that sports a garden for growing food. David set sail on the 20 March 2010 on an 11,000 nautical mile voyage to raise awareness of this issue. Good on him, but this is just one of many of these shameful floating horrors choking our mother-ocean.Humans. As Lou Reed would say: stick a fork in their arses and turn them over - they’re done.
Wikipedia
Images: random Google images
