My wife likes to watch videos on Wimp.com, in fact we all do from time to time. Anyway, we were home from school due to a snow day and just wasting a little time on the computer. She then read the title of a video she was about to watch. "This video should be seen by the whole world". Okay, usually when you get emails like that it means that you are about to get attacked by viruses, but this wasn't an email and I didn't really want to be the only person in the world who hadn't seen it. Before I give yo the link to it, I must warn you it is not pretty. It shows baby albatrosses in the Midway Atoll, dying a horrible death due to ingesting bits of plastic. This is a trailer for the full feature film made by a guy called Chris Jordan. At the end of the trailer, he gives you the address of his website and yes, you guessed it, I went there.
The link to the trailer is http://www.wimp.com/beseen/ and the link to the website is http://midwayfilm.com/index.html.
I'm pretty certain that if you read my blogs, it is because you are the same kind of person as I am. You love nature in all its forms. You probably feel you have a responsibility to leave this planet a tiny bit better than how you found it. I know in this age, that is a hard thing to accomplish, especially when one group of experts tell you one thing, and another group tell you the opposite. But every now and then you see something that you don't need experts telling you what to think, because it's there right in front of you, and this was one of those moments for me.
What the hell are we doing to our planet when we dump all that crap into the oceans. If you watch the videos on Chris' website, you will see some guys cleaning up a beach. They shovel loads of stuff onto the sidewalk and heave old fishing nets that have been discarded by commercial fishing boats. As soon as they finish, one of the men takes the camera down to the wash line and already there are loads of small pieces of plastic being washed up onto the sand.
In another clip, a wildlife officer does an onsite necropsy on a corpse. In that one bird he pulls out about six bottle tops, as well as other unidentified bits of plastic. Bottle tops are the most common item found in these bird.
I have never been a fan of bottled water. At all the meetings I have ever had to attend, there are always bottles of water handed out, as if it is more of a corporate badge than a source of hydration. If I have ever wanted a drink, I have always provided my own bottle that I filled up from the faucet. After all, that "spring water" they pass out is probably from the same place I got mine.
It is reported that there is a flotilla of plastic and other garbage floating in the Pacific, the size of Texas. We have got to stop crapping on our planet and ruining it for future generations. We have got to clean up our act and start being responsible for our actions. The technology is there to convert plastic back to oil. Oil that we can use elsewhere, instead of further messing up the planet with deep sea drilling and fracking. The main problem with that idea, as well as other cleaning systems is no one is making enough money out of it. We are just too greedy for our own good. When all the fish in the sea have gone, or are too poisonous to eat and the water is too toxic to swim in, then maybe someone will do something about it, because someone will be losing money.
It's time to wake up and smell the pig shit, because no one is smelling of roses anymore. We are all guilty and it's time to man up and fix it. No excuses.
