What I don’t see having two sides on is the issue of pollution. Global Climate Change, a term that was created to take the teeth out of “Global Warming”, aside the issue of improper resource management and the poor handling of our garbage problems, or the fact that there is garbage should not be deliberated upon, and simply dealt with.
This must first start on an individual scale. I believe that the Government, for the most part, and when it comes to this, should be completely sidestepped. While old men in overpriced suits deliberate first if anything should be done, then what should be done, the problem is only getting worse, where clearly there is a problem.
All across this poor planet of ours, garbage is piling up at a faster and faster rate with each passing day. Those familiar with the movie Slumdog Millionaire, will recall a scene at the end, when people living in shanty towns, flood the trash littered “streets,” a man jumps into a pile of trash, and throws garbage over his head in a fit of joy. This may have been the most stirring part of this movie, despite the heavy-handedness of eye gouging and the poorest of the poor in India, because the people, who were filmed, actually live in trashy, garbage-infested slums. This scene wasn’t even emphasized after the whole movie was reiterating how terrible the quality of life is in some places, and yet it still left me feeling most disheartened. Behind the fiction of the story, lay the ugly truth only partially hidden, of what people in Indian slums face on a daily basis.
Movies like Baraka, Home, and An Inconvenient Truth are simply scratching the surface of this pollution beast of burden. The plight of 3rd world countries is a reality in many parts of the world, however far more surreal notion exists just off the shores of our own country.
The North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, better known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is a collection of litter drawn to the Northern Pacific gyre. The gyre is a large-scale ocean current, circulating the water and collecting marine garbage in the north pacific. According to several websites, the size of this monster is somewhere between one and two times the size of Texas. Let me reiterate that, twice the size of Texas. That’s roughly: 537,640 square miles…of trash.
The trash comes from global regional pollution that is slowly carried along with the current and begins to amass the island that exists today. People hardly know about this disgusting tumor on the planet, and those that do, don’t really seem to care. Why does it seem that way? Because Mother Nature did humanity a solid, and collected all the trash for us to pick up, and it’s still there. Most of the work is already done for us, and as we sit idly by, Mother Nature will help us out again, and begin to decompose the plastic.
When this planetary digestion occurs, what the ocean is literally doing is destructing all the plastic, bits and flakes at a time. This plastic, which is unhealthy to begin with, and slowly, spreads it out across the ocean. It gets picked off by animals, dissolves into the ocean, and makes its slow crawl, back from whence it came.
Some organizations exist to correct this problem, but it seems to me that a great way to create jobs for an extended amount of time, as well a build international bridges, is create social works programs and hire people to collect the trash and handle it appropriately. It would seem to me that would be a great way to clean up our own mess, and to create revenue for what US President Barack Obama calls, the leader in future green living.
However, instead of making this a giant news debacle, we bury that story and cover the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of September 11th. Eight years after the attacks, eight long years filled with two wars, and an occupation of Iraq that looks like it has no actual end in sight. Although this is an important issue, it seems a more pertinent thing to do, rather than invade Iraq, and then get to the trials almost 10 years later.
Not all is lost against this tidal wave of establishment; some organizations actually are carrying the flag. Project Kaisei, a Chinese and American non-profit organization is researching a cleanup process, and to what degree we have destroyed our only habitat. The project, which conducts research on AN EFFING SAILING SHIP!:
There really is no more bad-ass of a way to clean up the environment than with a ship that could either be manned with pirates or whalers. Either sailing with Blackbeard or Ahab, it’s a noble effort for people to be taking care of their home planet without the help of massive government.
“If we ruin it, that’s the end of us. The ocean and earth will survive, but we may not.” – Project Kaisei
Source:
http://www.projectkaisei.org/
http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
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