Numerous stories are now being published and reported upon – both locally and internationally – regarding an enormous floating trash site about twice the size of Texas. This toxic stew site is floating northwest of the Hawaiian Islands and west of our northern California coastline. Unfortunately, this trash site also happens to be our beloved Pacific Ocean. Alas, our planet has finally arrived with a degrading mess that is equal in size to an environmental catastrophe and puts itself on par with the global warming dilemma.
Imagine an accumulation of inflated tires, rims, fishing nets, basketballs, and plastics of every sort from bags to rubber ducks spilled out of a lost cargo container years ago, all floating in one of the most environmentally sensitive areas of our Pacific Ocean. The impact to marine life and birds that mistake this mess for food – both at its surface and below this floating dump – endangers every living organism and puts our world to shame.
It’s not difficult to figure out how this has all come about. We can see a sampling of this along our own City of Long Beach’s shoreline. Take a look at the beach, ocean, and bay waters after any heavy rain and the “first flush.” Tons of trash washes up on the shore, creating a scavenger’s paradise as well as a serious dose of reality. Cargo ships do not bare all the responsibility, many thousands of people living in and around our city continue to dump their trash and garbage onto our streets and gutters with the outcome of all this winding its way into either one of our Los Angeles or San Gabriel rivers eventually hitting our inner bays, estuaries and finally our ocean. Of course, Long Beach and Southern California are not all to blame; human pollution happens up, down, and across the state, country, and world.
Obviously, the ocean as our trash dump is no secret, yet governments of the world – including our own – have given the cleanup a lot of lip service with little to no action taken.
Wouldn’t it be the best gift for the year 2008 to start a meaningful global dialogue with nations of the world to clean up this outrageous environmental mess threatening the very source of our lives’ beginnings? And of course learning to prevent how we got there in the first place!
Editor’s note: Here is an alarming video about the amount of accmulated plastic in the Pacific Ocean, with a particularly disturbing segment about the waters off of Long Beach’s shore.