Populum Test Server » PACIFIC OCEAN PLASTIC STEW ENTERING OUR FOOD SYSTEM

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain.

Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors.

He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

"Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune.

Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. "How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?" he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. "We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump," he says with a shrug. "That’s what we wanted to see."

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton.

There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. "Every one of us has this huge body burden," Moore says. "You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950." The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign:

Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Plastic never really goes away ~ discover why and what are its effects on humans ~ here's a short trailer before you read on .

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SAVE THE OCEANS

Dave Kisor was an Aviation Electrician, USN / USNR, starting in 1971, working on A-4F Skyhawks & A-7E Corsair 2s ashore and afloat on the USS Hancock & USS Coral Sea. AA Speech Communications, the BA and MA in Geography and presently working for the US Forest Service as a Physical Science Technician. It's not just an adventure, it's a job. He's politically & progressively Green, and owned by his magnificent cat, The Empress Panthera.
Dave KisorDave Kisor was an Aviation Electrician, USN / USNR, starting in 1971, working on A-4F Skyhawks & A-7E Corsair 2s ashore and afloat on the USS Hancock & USS Coral Sea. AA Speech Communications, the BA and MA in Geography and presently working for the US Forest Service as a Physical Science Technician. It's not just an adventure, it's a job. He's politically & progressively Green, and owned by his magnificent cat, The Empress Panthera.

Cleaning up our act

Having read this rather disturbing article, it's time to start researching what would be necessary to begin a garbage collection service for our oceans. The primary concern at the moment is mostly the particles small enough to be ingested by marine life, not only for the marine life itself, but for those who consider them part of their food chain. I would imagine a larger vessel with a screen mounted on the bow which would pass objects a certain size to be determined by oceanographers and marine biologists, with a conveyor belt leading to a hydraulic press that would generate several hundred tons of pressure to compact the plastic into a large "raft" to either enable it to be towed behind or have it craned off the ship at a continental port and transported to a plastics manufacturing plant. This is just one potential solution and we need others to get into the mix to provide ideas before the problem worsens (it can only get worse, but you should know what I mean). Since many good printed articles are missed because people don't want to read them, I would recommend a 3 to 4 minute video on this subject on one of the more popular video sharing sites where friends send links, and from that it could spread like wildfire. These are only suggestions. If someone points out a problem of this magnitude, someone else is generally tasked with solving the problem, or at least leading the team. Today's fresh catch of the day is tuna ala PVC au nurdles. Bon apatite!

by Dave Kisor (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 179 comments) on Sunday, June 3, 2007 at 11:50:02 PM