The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a "stew of plastic and marine debris, at least twice the size of Texas by some estimates, … floating in the Paciifc Ocean some 1,000 miles off the West Coast.“ The Great Pacific Garbage Patch? This senario sounds like Li’l Abner meets Godzilla, something out of a 1950’s „B“ science fiction movie, but is a waking-world reality, according to Paul Miller („The Plastics Paradox: We’re Drowning in an Ocean of Garbage,“ The Denver Post, 13 Jan 08).
Indeed, this floating garbage heap is very, very real. Miller explains: "Marine researcher Charles Moore has been studying this 3 million-ton waste dump in an area known as the North Pacific Gyre, which captures cast-off, wind-blown junk and spins it around in clockwise trade winds that circulate along the Pacific rim. Moore, who’s been tracking the mass for more than 10 years, says it’s too remote and difficult to clean up.“ Three million tons of gabage? Eek!
What do these three million tons consist of? "Overall, some 90 percent of floating marine litter is plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran, according to a Los Angeles Times report. About four-fifths of that trash comes from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and streets and into the sea. The rest of the junk – including nets, synthetic floats and other gear – comes from ships.“ This is a massive invasion, less-than-golden hordes of trash, coming by land, sea and air, converging in a certain part of the ocean.
Lest we feel this is an isolated, quirky incident, it turns out that "it’s one of six or so similar trash gyres on the planet. The U.N. Environment Program has calculated that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter float on every square mile of the oceans. By some estimates, 8 million pieces of litter enter oceans and seas every day.“ These are staggering numbers.
An insidious aspect of this trashy situation is that it is not a passing event. "Instead of biodegrading, plastic in the ocean photodegrades, which means UV rays from the sun eventually break down into smaller pieces. But that still takes a long time.“ A very, very long time. "The miracle of plastic has been around only 50 years, but some forms of it may take 100,000 years to fully degrade."
Nightmares are intended to be fearful enough to grab our attention. Certainly this waking nightmare, if paid attention to, is astounding enough to jerk us bolt upright from our sleep. Trash gyres the size of Texas should make us uncomfortable and anxious. Our lifestyle is building gargantuan, lethal, virtually permanent garbage piles in our oceans. Is this what we want?
This nightmare is shouting out that our dreams, our goals and aspirations need to be re-examined. As Miller writes, "Such is the paradox of the human condition: We create stuff to make our lives easier, but end up working harder to get rid of it.“ If the dream we yearn for and aspire to make real, lives of sumptuous ease, causes such toxic and ghastly side effects, it would behoove us to closely scrutinize the price of of this dream and possibly adjust it.
