Oceans as trash dumps
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Posted on March 7, 2008
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
The NY Times Science Times section is one of my favorites. Comes every Tuesday. I missed my paper the other week, but then it appeared amidst the melting snow, quite wet. So before I could read it, I had to dry it out for a couple of days.
And so I finally came to this story — the waste dump that has become our precious oceans. The story is about the human impact on the oceans, which is now reaching to the most remote places on the planet. Soon the arctic seas will be affected as shipping comes to its melting waters.
The article, Human Shadows on the Seas by one of my favorite environmental journalists, Andrew C. Revkin.
We blogged about this back in February Humans are ruining the oceans, based on the same set of new data reported in the journal Science. But Revkin’s story had a bit of a different spin on it. He included reports of the incredible amount of human trash that researchers found in the seas, including one of his own eyewitness experiences. Describing a visit to an island in a remote part of the Red Sea back in 1980, he writes:
The shore above the tide line was covered with old light bulbs, apparently tossed from the endless parade of ships over the years.
Light bulbs on the shore line. Gazillions of them. Folks out on ships replacing light bulbs and simply tossing the old ones overboard.
As always when I find an article or topic I want to blog about, I go looking for additional sources. I found this article on the CBS News website from 2004, Sailing the Seas of Trash, Vast Area of Pacific Ocean Polluted With Plastic. 
The writer here says that some of the plastic garbage probably dates back as far as the 1950s — “toothbrushes, bottlecaps and soap bottles,” according to a ship captain.
That’s what humans think of the oceans.
Here in the Great Lakes we are dealing with similar problems of toxic runoff, agricultural waste, garbage floating along beaches, ships dumping their ballast, along with multitudes of invasive species, into our waters, altering the ecosystem, killing off the fish that once abounded in this most magnificent fresh water system in all the world.
Guess what folks — the Earth can’t take it anymore. We have passed a tipping point. Everyday we lose life forms that thrived for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, never to return in the life of this planet. Every day we lose layers of the biodiversity that went nuts some millions of years ago and gave birth to this extraordinary era in evolution — that era from which Homo sapiens sapiens emerged.
Sometimes I feel, sense, the loss all around me. How bad do we want this to get?
Here’s something else to click on and read, Are There Really ‘Continents’ of Floating Garbage? , from a blog called The Daily Galaxy. I grabbed the photo above from this post, and also credit them for the following - a map that shows the floating patterns of so-called ‘continents of garbage.’
We harp on this theme so much here. This behavior represents an attitude, a very destructive one, a profound separation and alienation from our home, our womb. Think of it like life support –we are connected into these webs of life, these connecting lines, for our food, water, the air we breathe, all we need for life. And we are fraying them and clogging them and polluting them — and then we think, what? that life will go on with any quality, that we can survive if we cut these links, that we are impervious to the impacts of our self-destructive behavior?
Love of the Earth is the deepest form of love of self. It encompasses all we know and love, all our relationships, our families and friends, our neighborhoods and livelihoods. When we care for it, we care for all that is good within it.
When we trash it, we trash ourselves.
Technorati Tags: ocean pollution, ocean trash, floating continents of garbage, human impact on oceans, love of earth/love of self
Photo and graph credit: The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth and Beyond
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