Plastic Soup

While somewhat reminiscent of Bridget Jones' infamous "blue soup", to quote Billy Crystal, this is neither fun, nor funny.  This is major, and should be a monumentally disturbing reminder to every single soul on this planet: we are destroying the most precious thing we have--our world. Without it, nothing else exists. 

A story released today by the Associated Press chronicles the findings of several researchers who  uncovered yet another giant island of plastic floating about in the ocean.  This time it's in the Atlantic, and this time is inherently more troubling.  The floating garbage, which apparently is hard to spot from the surface and is spun together by a vortex of currents, was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

The studies describe a "soup of micro-particles" similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This garbage patch was discovered in the late 1990's and exists between Hawaii and California.  Researchers say that it is very likely these types of garbage patches exist in other places around the globe.


This is the type of stuff that keeps me awake at night.  What are we doing to our precious little planet?  We are ruining our environment with death-defying speed, and are so wrapped up in our Iphones and Facebook pages, and twittering endless drivel to the world that we seem to be oblivious to the fact that at some point, nature will self-correct.  We cannot survive in a world with oceans of plastic soup.   We cannot survive in a world where we can't breathe the air or safely harvest food.

I agree that it takes a village and the village is indeed forming.  I only fear that it is not happening fast enough. I drive a hybrid, I've reduced my carbon footprint to the best of my ability, and I reuse any material--plastic or otherwise--in as creative a manner as possibly can.  I reused 90 year old nails on a renovation project in my home because they were still good, they still worked just fine, and they were better than the ones I could buy at Home Depot.

I don't mean to sound like a doomsayer and I realize there are many, many problems in the world that warrant equal attention; starvation, poverty, genocide, and human rights violations to name a few, but this stuff is just scary.

If we are fortunate enough to keep our space program alive, let's hope that the next set of pictures we receive from space are not snapshots of our beautiful planet with a giant plastic footprint in the ocean.