Sunday, 10 May 2009

*sigh*

A beautiful morning and Harly and I were joined by Maevey - part cocker spaniel, part otter, part energiser bunny - for a lovely Sunday morning walk. Blue sky, calm sea, happy dogs and the simple joys of stick chasing.  I did make a mental note of the usual high-tide line of oomskah and detritus, but finding this one has to be added to the ever-groing list of 'I don't believe it!' 

The reason, today, that I'm becoming Victor Meldrew was the discovery of one of the carpark dustbins on the beach - contents everywhere.  Someone had taken the trouble to rip it out of its holder and to hurl it off the cliff on to the beach.  I was genuinely lost for words and spent several minutes trying to fathom who would get a kick out of such pathetic, wanton mindlessness.  That can't have been fun can it? Did anyone find that funny? So as Forrest Gump would say, 'That's all I have to say about that.'  *sigh*




Saturday, 2 May 2009

rubbish twice the size of Texas

There's a giant - and I do mean giant - swirl of plastic rubbish, twice the size of Texas, aimlessly floating in the meandering currents of the northwestern Pacific. Due to the quirky, circular and endless nature of the planet's greatest ocean tides, all the non-degraded rubbish somehow finds its way to the same spot where it joins an ever-growing raft of detritus.

Twice the size of Texas! A raft of plastic that will never biodegrade, the size of a large country, choking the heart of the planet. If, as is regularly said by the great and the good, the rain-forests are the planet's lungs then the seas are its blood stream and pulse - and the Pacific must be its heart.

I'd heard about this before, but must have filed away it in the back of my mind in the hope that it would go away or turn out not to be true. But it is true and it's scary to the point of being surreal in the true sense of the word. Paraphrasing the report in today's Times...

'The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one. The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals. "You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy,” said Mr Moore.

In the time honoured spirit of thinking globally and acting locally, it seems ever more imperative that we help to rid our small sorry beach from plastic and gunk - not just for our own sake but for the sake of the Pacific - where it seems that it will surely end up.

The story, written in sadly fatalistic tones is here,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6206498.ece

Moore lamented that because of the plastic's tiny size and the scale of the problem, he believes that nothing can be solved at sea. “Trying to clean up the Pacific gyre would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went.” However there are some people having a go and the site for the optimistic operation to clean it up is here http://www.projectkaisei.org/