Landed in Honolulu. Couldn’t wait to take long walk on beach. As usual, such a treat, except for this:
Add a few dead fishes. And Prad and I had plenty of material for another depressing conversation. I told him about the work done by Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and their expeditions to the Garbage Patch in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
If I hadn’t researched this before, I may even have missed the tiny plastics. Every time I visit the island, I am struck by the casual attitude of its inhabitants towards their environment. Trash not just on the beach, but also along hiking trails, roads, . . .
Collected lots of sea glass on Maui this year. It amazed us how much we found-900 pieces in a few hours.
Then it hit us, how much garbage must be dumped in the ocean for this much sea glass to wash up on the shore. billions and billions of bottles…
That’s crazy… I had heard about the garbage patch but it seems so surreal, so…
If we can mine landfills, I hope we will be able to clean up oceans and beaches…
Oh, mining landfills, yeah, the link to learn out more :
http://www.elrst.com/2008/08/20/why-recycling-has-a-really-bright-future/
Thanks Marguerite, keep up the good work ! π
Thank you so much for drawing attention to this situation.
Edouard, do people in France know about the Garbage Patch?
I heard about it, but I am not sure one person out of 100 here know about it. as a matter of fact, I have very partial data on that and read about it only one article.
I have something related to that matter for tomorrow… stay tuned and enjoy ! π
My husband filled somewhat over 50 rubbish bags with broken glass off our beach. It’s a small bay too but overlooked by a hall until 20 odd years ago. We never went on the beach without shoes. We even swam in them. How sad is that!
What really hacked us off though was the new glass that kept appearing. Mostly beer bottles. At least older glass was not generally quite as sharp.
The local rubbish collection made a special effort to take all the bags of glass for us which was great.
viv in nz
[…] as Marguerite was complaining on her blog about the waste lying on the beautiful beaches of Hawaii, the United Nations are launching this week-end an initiative to tackle the […]
Chose promise, chose due (a promised thing is due…)
here is my article on that very subject : http://www.elrst.com/2008/09/19/cleaning-up-the-world-with-the-united-nations/
Hope you will like it Marguerite… and your readers as well ! π
Knubby knitter, thanks for being a witness. Witnessing is an undervalued task in our quest to protect our environment.
Edouard, many thanks! as usual thanks for your international perspective.
Can we find adequate enough ways to warn each other in the human community of impending danger before we our waste products engulf us?
We in the family of humanity are going to be forced to do better in our efforts to communicate in a more reality-oriented way about ominously looming threats of an human-driven, global calamity of some kind. If we keep doing precisely what our leaders are saying and doing now, the future for our children looks bleak. We can surely do more and do it better. After all, human beings are remarkably intelligent, ingenious and adaptive.
Before we can determine what new and different to do, perhaps a brief analysis of our current, distinctly human-induced, global predicament is in order. Consider for a moment some of the ways in which my generation of leaders has gone so terribly wrong.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me generation.” We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe….. the thousands of greedy little kings of capital concentration, big business potentates and governmental sinecurists. We enjoy freedom and living without limits. Of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or discussions of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
AGW Skeptics and Deniers promote their “big lie”, just as they have since the days of Rachel Carson, when I was a child.
Either unwittingly or perversely, we have people who are distorting and seeking to deny what everyone knows to be real, I believe, for the sake of protecting their selfish interests and the interests of their benefactors.
Look at the behavior of the current powerbrokers of the human community’s global economy. Many too many of them have determined that the global economy exists for their benefit……not for the improvement of the wellbeing of humanity, not for the protection of life as we know it, not to preserve the Earth and its environs. They neglect, and express token regard for, the family of humanity, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth’s body. Actually, they are adamantly engaged in little else than “feathering their own nests.”
The self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” among us, including the Bilderbergers from whom we have heard this week, as well as the members of The Trilateral Commission, expect only that their `inalienable rights’ to plunder natural resources and conspicuously consume them be condoned.
Do not dare to disturb them.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Hi, I walk or run Kailua beach on Oahu every day. Today, several of us collected over 1,000 pieces of sharp glass on the beach. It was not left there, it was washing up in the waves as if someone had dumped it off shore not knowing the current brings everything in on the windward side. I collected 200 pieces myself. KGMB ran a short story tonight and I plan to also. I am trying to track down the source. I reported it to the Department of Health, the attorney general and some federal sources. If anyone has information please let me know. I am curious as to where knutty knitter collected that much glass. Is it in Hawaii and if so, where? If it is nearby, or along the same current, maybe we can find a source and stop it. My contact is Malia@hawaiireporter.com – Thanks! Malia
There is lots of info out there on plastic, this article talks not only about the accumulation of plastic debris on the beaches of Kauai but also what is happening to the plastic once it is deposited. An interesting read!
Effects of mechanical and chemical processes on the degradation of plastic beach debris on the island of Kauai, Hawaii
By David A. Cooper and Patricia L. Corcoran
Published in:
Marine Pollution Bulletin