We heard poet Mary Oliver read from her works at Benaroya Hall here in Seattle last night. The collection of poems she read spanned her entire oeuvre–an excellent selection. She read for an hour; it was such a delight to hear her work read in her own voice. Also a delight was her sense of humor, her humble good grace, her great heart.
Her relationship with the natural world, with the beauty and gift of nature itself, made me feel utterly sane. I’m not sure what I mean by that, just that I felt at ease and sane by the end of the reading. Perhaps her call to presence when breathing the sweet air of the morning, or hearing an owl at night, made me feel that there is great sanity in loving the loveliness of this planet we share. That all the flat screen tvs and ipods in the world can’t compete with the feel of the sun on your skin on a summer day.
The other day I was paddle boarding around the bay in West Seattle. At this time of year, we have extreme low and high tides, and the slack tide in between tends to be the collection point for a lot of garbage in the water. Even as the day was lovely, the paddling exquisite, I kept coming across a disturbing pattern: big globs of muck that were built out a tangled mess of fishing line, 6-pack ring, seaweed, plastic bags, algae, bungee cords, dead fish, feathers, plastic bottles, unidentified gunk and plastic food containers. The common ingredient: plastic. And there were a lot of these little floating islands.
These congealed half-bio-half-plastic masses are very quickly becoming ubiquitous in our oceans. If the only damage were that of the scenery, I could almost but not quite shrug it off.
The damage is much, much worse. In fact, you could say that what I was seeing off Lincoln Park was just the barest tip of an iceberg.
Sierra Magazine has an article this month entitled “Message in a Bottle” and it’s worth a few minutes to read. Gird yourself, you may not be prepared for the story:
There is an area off the coast of Japan known as The Garbage Patch, three times the size of Texas and a seeming doldrums where the world’s plastics collect and degrade.
Don’t kid yourself: plastic doesn’t ever entirely degrade like things in the organic world. Plastic simply breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. Those pieces at some point become indistinguishable from krill and other food sources in the ocean
This plastic broth is making its way into the food chain; the bellies of baby fish are gorged with the stuff and yet they die of starvation. Adult birds and fish are ingesting it. It’s real, it’s happening.
One of the main culprits is a thing called plastic nurdles--manufactured plastic molded into small nuggets for easy shipment to manufacturing plants all around the world to make things like that handy blue plastic water bottle, that shovel and bucket your kids play with at the beach, the parts in your car, the caps on your soda, the packing in that new TV (not to mention the TV itself), the plastic wrapper on the grapes you brought to the picnic, the cap on your latte-to-go, your flip-flops, and that bobble-head toy you got at the ballpark. The massive ships carrying these nurdles sometimes lose their cargo, sometimes they accidentally dump large quantities of the stuff, sometimes it just gets loose.
The thing I can’t get out of my head, the thing that haunts me is how much plastic there is. We really don’t even think about plastic as plastic anymore, we think of it as normal. Diamonds may not be forever, after all they are organic structures, but plastic really IS forever. Where will all of this stuff go, this stuff that really IS forever?
In my own little life, we have upped our efforts to decrease the amount of plastic in our lives, but it’s an uphill battle. We reuse our plastic bags and buy in bulk as much as possible, we forego the plastic cap on the latte, we avoid the over-architected containers.
And we have to content ourselves with that. It’s not enough, but it’s something we can do.
The clean-up on this mess will be monstrous; if we started today, we could have 100% employment for decades. The one upside to this is it’s undeniable: the massive three-times-the-size-of-Texas floating islands of garbage are real. You could go there today and be blown away by the iceberg-depth and island-breadth of the mess.
Post-script on this issue: My pal Diana sent me a head’s up that there is an opt-in green initiative for customers to request that companies no longer send catalogs. It’s called Catalog Choice and is a Green Certified site. I went there, signed up on their secure page, and was able to request that Dell no longer send me catalogs.
It will take 12 weeks to process, but hey. It’s notable that Dell has opted in to participate in this program. Other companies, such as Land’s End, have not. So you’re at the mercy of the company’s own sense of marketing fairness or internal processes, whichever.
Thanks Di–much appreciated, since the Dell (bless their hearts!) catalogs were really the nagging irritation!
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I do not blame companies for trying to make a profit. That’s what they’re there for. I do get irritated, and especially so this time of year, when I get dozens and dozens of catalogs that don’t even make the cut to a save-for-later pile–they go straight into the recycle bin, unopened, and certainly unappreciated. Dell is a big one that comes to mind: we are a mac household. It’s ridiculous for them to send all these catalogs.
And how many trees gave their lives for this instant recycle fodder? Is the catalog industry involved in recycling and is the production of catalogs therefore job security? You gotta wonder.
Lifehacker posts an article today on the questionable practice of sending catalogs to anyone who has ever lived or used a product. The excellent query: why can’t we easily unsubscribe from catalogs? We should be able to–not only because the constant irritation of receiving these things actually does nothing good for their brand but also because they involve us in unenvironmental behavior that for some of us is pretty disturbing.
I say: do the right thing. Make it easy for us to opt out–put a link on your site that allows us to go there and opt out. We’ll remember you kindly in the future.
Take a few minutes and watch this short narrated slideshow documenting climate change. Fortunately it ends on an upnote…if we choose the right paths now.
Originally, this blog was about a year long project to track my personal driving and transportation habits (My Life w/ Car series). That project impacted lots of things in my life, not just transportation. I still try to minimize driving, which in turn minimizes "hunting-and-gathering" (aka shopping) which in turn leaves more time for lots and lots and lots of other things.
by Paul Hawkin
