Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Until my ghastly tale is told; this heart within me burns.” From his epic work: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
This ghastly, if not poignant look at Midway Island, 2,000 miles out in the Pacific Ocean, reminds us of the sublime beauty of our planet via the waved albatross, but how fast humanity’s plastics ravage the natural world. The following four-minute video allows you a mind-changing look into humanity’s onslaught upon the natural world. (reference).
Hopefully, the four minutes you took to watch this very disturbing video will energize you to speak up, take action and push for deposit-return laws on every piece of plastic that leaves our stores across America and around the planet.
We must take action with our state and federal leaders to stop further damage to our natural world. Our civilization and all civilizations around the globe must implement plastic-deposit-return laws if we hope to salvage what’s left of the health of our oceans worldwide. We need to implement effective educational systems in order to make every world citizen responsible for that plastic bottle cap, toothbrush holder, soft drink container, Styrofoam cooler and the other 100,000 plastic items that we buy and toss 24/7 around the planet.
In my State of Colorado, we tried to institute bottle-return laws in 1974 and 1988, but Coors Beer and other large bottle users defeated our efforts. World leaders and manufacturing CEOs echo similar disregard for our natural world. As to common citizens around the world, they remain largely indifferent to the effects of the plastics they discard.
When Coca-Cola hit 100 years of age, the CEO boasted, “I am so proud to bring the world Coke.”
In reality, via my world travels, I watched millions of kids and parents smiling with toothless mouths because they suffer caffeine-sugar addiction from Coke and other soft drinks. They lack any access to toothbrushes and floss. Today, we know that soft drinks create heart problems and obesity. Would the CEOs of our leading food and beverage marketers take action to stop their products from circulating around the world to render millions of toothless smiles? Would they add a toothbrush and floss to every product purchase ? Would they support deposit-return laws for plastic containers? Answer: not a chance.
In Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, he said, “And yet you do destroy the planet, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”
Through this series, you witnessed pictures of the 100 million ton, size of Texas, floating island out in the Pacific Ocean: “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. It’s huge, it’s ugly and it’s growing. Every day of the year, countless billions of humans toss plastic somewhere into a lake, stream, river, or on the land and into the oceans.
As you saw from the four-minute video, we witness and understand the damage, but we fail to take action.
Eleanor Roosevelt said it 50 years ago; “We must prevent human tragedy rather than run around trying to save ourselves after an event has already occurred. Unfortunately, history clearly shows that we arrive at catastrophe by failing to meet the situation, by failing to act when we should have acted. The opportunity passes us by and the next disaster is always more difficult and compounded than the last one.”
If we live out Roosevelt’s tale to its “ghastly finish” and fail to take action,we will face acidified oceans where marine life cannot live and procreate. We will suffer the death of plankton that create 80-90 percent of the oxygen we breathe on this planet. We face warming oceans via the carbon footprint from fossil fuel burning which, in turn, destroys our climatic systems worldwide. All marine life continues to eat and incorporate those mini-particles of plastic into their systems, so that, when we eat them, we face the same consequences as the albatross on Midway Island.
Frankly, I am not optimistic that humans share the collective will or intelligence to save themselves. If we do possess any chance, we need to move on information found in this video and these pictures to change the way we use plastics around the world.
Because United States citizens use two million, (yes, that’s 2,000,000) plastic bottles every five minutes and discard them—we need to take action immediately.
Very few people comprehend the enormity of the plastics onslaught around our planet. Again, it’s floating and landing not only on beaches, but under the oceans as well. In its wake, we find utter devastation of eco systems, marine life and, in the end a “ghastly tale” for all of humanity.
Important books
Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, 2012
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman 2007 A scholarly research on how the Earth will fare after Homo sapiens are gone.
Man Swarm, and the Killing of Wildlife, Dave Foreman 2011 Mankind as locusts.
Overshoot by William Catton