[getsmart-l] Next time you're at the grocery checkout- Its cloth not plastic!

[23skidoo]

Not so fantastic Plastic!
...And what for legacy to leave behind

Film at 11:00
***
"Plague Of Plastics - Forever" 
By Frosty Wooldridge 
5-10-7 


In my world travels from the Arctic to Antarctica, humanity holds 
nothing sacred on this planet. I've sailed and Scuba dived across all 
the oceans and seas. I've rafted or canoed rivers from the Amazon to 
the Mississippi to the Yangtze. I've explored all the Great Lakes to 
many unknown lakes. I've walked on the Hawaiian to the Galapagos 
Islands to Ross Island at the bottom of the world. I bicycled along 
the North Sea in Norway and around Lake Titicaca in South America. 


At every location on our globe where home sapiens inhabit, humanity 
throws its trash in every conceivable form. 


But by far the most dangerous--any way you cut it, plastics prove 
themselves humanity's worst invention. Ubiquitous, forever, deadly and 
ugly! 


As a teenager, I Scuba dived in pristine waters from Lake Huron, the 
Hawaiian Islands, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. I saw 
magic at 40 feet below the surface on coral reefs! Incredible beauty! 
Thirty years later, my dives carried me into the most disgusting 
sights on the planet. Plastic drift nets, cut away by fishing 
captains, killed innocent sea life--forever! For the past 40 years, 
humans have tossed their plastic containers, pop tops, diapers, 
billions of bags and every kind and size of plastic trash into our 
lakes, rivers and oceans. Plastic destroys everything it touches. 


As I canoed down the Mississippi River from its beginning at Lake 
Itasca, Minnesota, it started out as beautiful as a dream. Within five 
miles, I watched hundreds, then thousands of plastic containers float 
alongside me after having been pitched by other boaters. Plastic bags 
hung from trees and billowed in the water as they draped from branches 
along Old Man River. People drove cars over the river's edge and left 
couches and lawn chairs on sand bars. Clothes and junk got tossed 
along its 2,552 mile trip to New Orleans. It made me sick every day. I 
filled two large trash bags a day and I couldn't begin to get it all. 


On my bicycle ride from Norway to Greece in 2005, we boarded a ferry 
from Italy to Patros. Along the way, we witnessed huge floating gobs 
of plastic trash collected in ugly swarms hundreds of yards long. 


Plastic proves the worst human invention, besides chemicals, because 
plastic doesn't break down or biodegrade. About the only thing that 
destroys it is fire, but then, the pollution from the smoke proves 
fatal to the environment. 


Alan Weisman, author of "Polymers are forever" published in the 
May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine: 


http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270 


He wrote, "The true answer is we just don't know how much is out 
there." 


Weisman wrote about Richard Thompson, "He knew the terrible tales of 
sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of 
swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green 
sea turtle in Hawaii dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, 
and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a 
study on fulmar bird carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. 
Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs-an average of 
forty-four pieces per bird. 


"There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although 
it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had 
blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic 
pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms 
would likely be consuming them. When they get as small as powder, even 
zooplankton will swallow them." 


"Can you believe it?" said Richard Thompson, one of the men 
researching how widespread plastic moved into water systems. "They're 
selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, 
into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to 
be swallowed by little sea creatures." 


For those of you old enough to remember Dustin Hoffman in, "The 
Graduate", do you remember the older man telling Dustin, "Plastic, my 
boy, that's the future!" 


While WWII created research for plastics, after 1970, this unnatural 
substance changed everything and it became everything. Once it became 
a container, all hell broke loose. Every time a group of 
environmentalists tried to get a 10 cent deposit/return placed on it, 
corporations overpowered do-gooders with negative ads to defeat return 
laws. 


Soon, the disposable diaper arrived! On my bicycle travels across 
America and the world, I've seen tens of thousands of soiled, plastic 
baby diapers thrown into every corner of the planet. 


Weisman wrote, "What happens to plastic, however, can be seen most 
vividly in places where trash is never collected. Humans have 
continuously inhabited the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona 
since AD1000-longer than any other site in today's United States. The 
principal Hopi villages sit atop three mesas with 360-degree views of 
the surrounding desert. For centuries, the Hopis simply threw their 
garbage, consisting of food scraps and broken ceramic, over the sides 
of the mesas. Coyotes and vultures took care of the food wastes, and 
the pottery shards blended back into the ground they came from. 


"That worked fine until the mid-twentieth century. Then, the garbage 
tossed over the side stopped going away. The Hopis were visibly 
surrounded by a rising pile of a new, nature-proof kind of trash. The 
only way it disappeared was by being blown across the desert. But it 
was still there, stuck to sage and mesquite branches, impaled on 
cactus spines." 


On our oceans, "In 1975, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences had 
estimated that all oceangoing vessels together dumped 8 million pounds 
of plastic annually. More recent research showed the world's merchant 
fleet alone shamelessly tossing around 639,000 plastic containers 
every day. 


"The real reason that the world's landfills weren't overflowing with 
plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill. 
After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore concluded 
that 80 percent of mid-ocean flotsam had originally been discarded on 
land." 


Weisman wrote, "DURING HIS FIRST THOUSAND-MILE CROSSING of the gyre, 
Moore calculated half a pound for every one hundred square meters of 
debris on the surface, and arrived at three million tons of plastic. 
His estimate was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the 
first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only 
represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger 
fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, 
Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had 
employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by 
weight than plankton on the ocean's surface. In fact, it wasn't even 
close: six times as much." 


As you read through this series, it gets uglier than you can imagine. 
"As for the little pellets known as nurdles, 5.5 quadrillion-about 250 
billion pounds-were manufactured annually perfect for bite-size for 
little creatures that the bigger creatures eat, were being flushed 
seaward." 


That half-century's total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. 


Ladies and gentlemen of America: as you can see, it's what you can't 
see that's doing incredible damage to our planet home. As I said, 
plastics prove the worst invention of humanity. They're insidious, 
sinister, menacing and deadly to this planet's living creatures. 


Any questions? Why would someone knowingly toss 639,000 plastic 
containers into our oceans daily? Why would Pete Coors, owner of Coors 
Brewing, pretend to be an environmentalist in Colorado, but spend 
millions of dollars to defeat our bottle/return laws not once but 
twice? Short answer: he makes $13 million a year, but that's not 
enough. He wants more profit with total disregard for all the trash 
his cans, bottles and the plastic waste generated across the 
landscape. Just think of all corporation heads thinking and acting 
like Pete Coors. Sickening! 


The next time you're at the grocery checkout, they may ask, "Paper or 
plastic?" You answer as you pull them out, "I've got my cotton bags, 
thank you." 


It's a start. Nature thanks you! 


For further insights into our ongoing onslaught of this planet, Alan 
Weisman's article is an excerpt from his book "The World Without Us" 
published by St. Martin's Press in July, 2007. 

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