Despite what my brother would consider to be my touchy-feely liberal tendencies, I really don't care about the environment. Academically speaking, I understand the impact of pollution and the importance of maintaining a stable ecosystem; however, emotionally I typically can't muster the wherewithal to be truly upset by environmental issues. Perhaps it comes from too many years of watching Captain Planet; now I expect serious environmental violators to be malevolent and dastardly mutants who pollute just for the fun of it. Hell, one of the villains was named Looten Plunder. How do you beat a name like that? Answer: you can't.My environmental apathy typically continues unchecked until, every once in awhile, I stumble across some information regarding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. No, this is not the mythical home of the Garbage Pail and Cabbage Patch Kids. In fact, it's a giant island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that's twice the size of Texas... and it's made up entirely of garbage. It's also colloquially known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, which is a way cooler name.
Simply put, the currents in the North Pacific Ocean (the North Pacific Gyre) gather all the garbage in the ocean and bring it into a swirling but stable area where it can fester forever. Said garbage kills fish and other marine life. Have you ever let a bag of trash sit outside for too long? Well multiply that by about one trillion and then let is stew in water. It's not hard to see why this sucker would be problematic.
In any case, this is an environmental tidbit that people can wrap their heads around. "Floating garbage island twice the size of Texas" stays with a person far better than "Global warming will make the Earth's temperature rise a few degrees in a hundred years." While the latter is serious, it doesn't sound serious to a lot of folks. A new continent made of garbage really sounds like a big problem.
The beautiful thing is that this trash vortex is getting larger. More and more garbage keeps accumulating. There's something sadistically fascinating about the whole thing. Part of me wants to see this eco-disaster get worse and worse. At the moment, the vortex isn't visible by satellite (so no chance of finding it on Google Maps, I'm afraid) because it all floats on the water's surface, but maybe if we let the sumbitch accumulate into a super-sized mass of used tires, discarded diapers, and old Filet o' Fish wrappers, we can have ourselves a new garbage continent called Trashica.
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"By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!"
2 comments:
Environmental shit makes El Hijo hide under the covers. It's the only version of Armageddon he's ever known.
@Batmite: Perhaps the Trash Vortex gives rise to the Smog Monster, which Gozilla fought in one of his movies (not even making that up, unfortunately).
@Contemplator: They had a thing on ABC not too long ago that showed a kind of Worst Case Scenario for environmental destruction. It would have given the poor guy nightmares for months!
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