#albatross are water birds too (they float in there and also eat fish from the ocean)

[mla0]

Another AU info moment

I have one AU that I’m reworkshopping now because I’m fond of it where it’s essentially like. General slenderverse but in a society where some people are born with birds wings, and there’s a class hierarchy between people who do and people who don’t, as well as a micro-hierarchy within winged society based on the general notions and symbolism people associate with different birds.

There’s also sometimes good need for wings to be removed. If they become too damaged, if they’re causing undue hardship to the person who has them, and some people simply choose to have them removed for their own personal reasons. This however does carry a social stigma regardless of the reasoning, but it’s especially harsh if the reasoning is deemed ‘not good enough’ by others. This is in part because it’s such a noticeable change so it’s easy for those who wish to pick it apart to do so, but it’s also because generally being born with wings is seen as a gift of some kind and to have them removed under any circumstances almost as a slight against the universe.

My original assignments of birds for the mla0 crew:

Michael/Patrick: Magpie

Shaun: None

Stormy: Canary

Now though I’d probably say:

Michael/Patrick: Sparrow

Shaun: Removed due to damage complications (Albatross)

Stormy: Canary

OUGHHHHHHH???????????? I FUCKING LOVE BIRDS IM OBSESSED

crazy into your bird choices too..... shaun as an albatross is really cool, and so is michael/patrick as a sparrow..... and you know i love the canary thing, i've talked about it before. i am exploding with my mind. shaun having her wings removed is extremely eyebrow raise-y and makes me super curious

i used to live in california, and in some areas you'd see albatross a lot. super sad that they're endangered (i think?) because they're some of the most fascinating birds i've ever seen. i'd see them flying overhead when going on trips in the car. they fly for so incredibly long across the ocean with their HUGE ass wings... i also heard they have really strong and loyal partnerships with their mates. i used to see sparrows and canaries all the time in minnesota where i was born, too.....

welcome to Andersens and Co.

[hollydownerdesign]

14/05: Case Studies

His Epic Message Will Make You Want to Save the World | Short Film Showcase

Statistic driven, poetic, well spoken, statistic displayed as well as powerful word play, along with imagery of our planet, the beautiful and the disgusting parts. He gives a perspective of our impact, on the planet and the animals we share it with. He talks about how the human race is so intelligent yet we are destroying our planet so fast, in relation to how long we have been on the planet. ‘1000 times the rate of animal extinction that even before’… ’Say good bye to…lions, rhinos,' etc. is powerful no one wants to see these animals to go extinct. He talks about how in earths time line was put into 24 hour we have only been on earth for 3 seconds we are. He talks about our planet as ‘just right’, the perfect amount of distance away from the sun etc… He also did a video called 'Dear Future Generations: Sorry' which he again gave solutions after discussing the huge issue of deforestation, climate change and the extinction on animals caused by humans.

The Indoor Generation by VELUX

Creating awareness of health impacts of our homes, how we are not ventilation our homes, how we are not letting nature in, we are over insulating our homes trapping in all the bugs etc in. The video is narrated by a young girl. She talks about not receiving natural light and air can impact our health; illnesses, depression, loneliness. bacteria, moisture etc. Powerful short videos that show everyday lives; eating, sleeping, socialising, combined with some troubling signs like coughing, illness, obvious signs of bacteria, mould… statistics/narration that gives you a better understanding of what you are seeing. The glass boxes… that have labels on them like “damp & mould” or “indoor pollution” with humans inside which ‘visualises the invisible’ - what we may not be able to see but is there. this video at the end gives solutions which makes you feel not so overwhelmed by this issue.

Sea Turtle with Straw stuck in it's Nostril - "NO" TO PLASTIC STRAWS

The poor turtle vs straw video. The video went viral which was a catalyst for people to stop using straws. This video I found on YouTube (one of many uploads) has 35 million views. The straw was stuck in the turtle’s nostril, Costa Rica University students who research seaturtles and we collecting data on sea turtle mating “when they noticed something in the nose of a 77-pound (35-kilogram) male.” The students in the video thought it was a parasite, and were horrified when they found it to be a plastic straw. 10 centimetres long. “Usually, trash such as plastic bags and even toothbrushes end up in a sea turtle's stomach, she says. It's also quite common to see fishing hooks embedded in a turtle's mouth or flipper, Figgener adds.” In the 8 minute video you can see the turtle is in pain and struggling to break. The students are discussing what the see and all horrified when the realise what the are trying to pull out, I believe someone says ‘thats the same straws used at…’.

‘Tree’

This experience takes you on a journey of being a tree. You start as a seedling under ground and grow into a large tree. Key immersive features of this experience is the atmosphere, this is created by mist/water and echoing sound when under ground, and lighting and ambient sounds of wildlife when above ground surrounded by other trees. The experience allows you to move your arms (branches) while growing up. Once you reach the top of the other trees it becomes night. We begin to hear noises of trucks and see fire in the distance. as the fire gets closer to us, the perspective changes from first person to third person. This make you feel as though you are exiting your body floating to up to heaven. Our journey is sped up, but our environment is still moving in real time. This changes the experience and would be more effective if we could see our environment around us changing with us. This would still capture the beauty of the forrest which is clear a focus for the project. It would also stop the user from getting bored in the middle of the experience when we are growing because there would be a lot more going on.

'The story of a spoon'

This video was created by green piece, encouraging people to stop using plastic spoons. It emphasises the long journey the spoon goes on, from the material it is made from, to ending in the hands of the user. Showing images of the pollution that the plastic spoon’s journey creates. The voice over help depict what is happening in the video. The message at the end of the video is very powerful - ‘is it too much effort to just wash a reusable spoon, stop using plastic spoons.’

'Becoming Homeless'

A 7 minute experience on becoming homeless lets you experience what it is like to lose your job and home and have to live on the streets. I one part of the experience you meet with other homeless people to hear their experience, on how they became homeless and how it can happen to anyone. It opens many eyes to the problem. This experience is about creating empathy towards homeless people and changing peoples negative attitudes towards them. The study around the experience showed people were more likely to sign a petition etc after experiencing what it was like to be homeless - having a long lasting effect. The experience shares actually experiences, which people emotionally connect with. The virtual reality experience was compared to reading a narrative around homeless and show more people signed the petition for more affordable housing after the experience rather than a video or reading about it. The narrative of the experience is; we start in our home, we become aware of the situation we are in, losing our job and can’t afford to pay rent. We have to chose items to sell to make rent this week. Which was not enough, there is not enough room in homeless shelters because of the rise of homeless people so we spent our nights on buses to keep warm. This is where we hear stories from other homeless people. We have to protect what is left of our possessions while trying not to be harassed by locals. This was upsetting and stressful for me, as you are experiencing being homeless as yourself. I felt personal attacked by this man. The narration/voice over was useful in the experience to understand what was going on.

‘A Breathtaking Journey’

This experience you are empathising with is a refugee and their journey escaping their war-torn country. The journey shows the participants the stressful, long and scary experiences refugees may encounter escaping their country. The experience is viewed through VR the participant sits in a crate that replicates the crate the user is sitting in the virtual environment. They also are wearing a mask the can still breath through but it disperses smells through, and headphones that full immersive the user into the virtual environment, blocking out any sounds from the real environment.

‘Clouds of Sidra’

“This charming 12-year-old girl will guide you through her temporary home: The Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. Zaatari is home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and children make up half the camp's population. In this lyrical VR film, Sidra leads you through her daily life: Eating, sleeping, learning and playing in the vast desert city of tents.”… this 10 minute VR video opens eyes to the living conditions and lifestyle of the Syrian refugees who have left their country due to war. at the end of the video there was information on how many live in the camps and how to help out.

‘this is climate change: feast’

This experience is about the clearing of the amazon to make space for cattle ranches. This experience I found upsetting, I felt like I was apart of the destruction, being inside the truck that was flatten/clearing trees and bushes, being present when the the trees being cut down made me feel responsible. This was more impactful for me than the ‘Tree’ experience because I was actually there seeing it happen standing beside the man cutting down the trees, just watching. I am aware of the issues of deforestation, so I can understand the importance of what is going on in this video, but they added short sentences/statistics of the impacts/what is happening. After we experience the cutting down of the trees we more to the ‘why’ this is happening, I come from a farming background so I am aware of farming cattle for meat but it still caught me off guard and it made me feel angry and sad. The experience was powerful and did not need any voice overs or narration, it was clear enough through the visuals and small written quotes.

(images of seahorse, seabird and turtle)

These are images from National Geographic that creates awareness of the plastic pollution issue. It also makes you rethink what you  buy. These photos are similar to the turtle video, they are catalysts to banning these single use plastic objects. It makes the viewer aware of the impacts on marine organisms.

(image of dead Albatross)

The dead Albatross photo went viral making awareness of plastic pollution affecting birds. Birds mistake the colourful pieces of plastic as food. In this photo you can see the bird decomposing revealing its cause of death, plastic. You can see items that everyone has used, a lighter, number of lids, etc, along with other objects that are broken pieces of a larger objects. There is a large number of photos like this online. I have watched videos on scientist that study albatross; what they are eating and where they are getting it from. An alarming number of dead albatross bodies are found on coastal areas where they breed filled with plastic.

[yoursongpodcast]

For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #80, songwriter Zoë Lewis talks about her song 'Plastic Soup', which is from her album 'The Sound of Wings'.

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

The Coastal Studies Center in Provincetown

5 Gyres (the organization)

Five gyres (the oceanic currents)

Plastic smog aka plastic soup

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: not how it's usually pictured, but still terrible

Plastic in the food chain

Cole Porter

Zoë's song 'Snow White' (aka 'The Day Snow White Said The F Word')

For more information about Zoë Lewis, her music, her videos, her two musicals, her upcoming shows, and her albums, go to her website at http://zoelewis.com/.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on iTunes - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' on stitcher - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' rss feed

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Facebook

Episode Transcript:

[BEGINNING OF 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

Swirling around in the beautiful blue somewhere between the equator and you there's a tear in the sky where the albatross flew man and his madness makes nightmares come true unfortunately this is so and that's why I want you to know... There is an island the size of Texas a floating island of piles and piles of plastic it's simply drastic, it's not fantastic because the fishes all eat plastic soup and all the ...

['PLASTIC SOUP' CONTINUES PLAYING UNDER THE FOLLOWING]

JAKE: Hello, and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today I'm talking to Zoë Lewis, and the song she'll be talking about is named ...

['PLASTIC SOUP' CRESCENDOES, THEN FADES OUT:]

... plastic soup! ...

JAKE: Plastic Soup, and is from her album 'The Sound of Wings'. So where would you like to start, Zoë?

ZOË: When you're a songwriter, you start seeing songs all around, and when you get moved by something, or angry about something, you, you know, you're lucky enough to have a platform to be heard -- to put your voice out there. It's lovely! So even if 10 people hear it, that's ok -- 20, 100, you know, and then it escalates. We all have our stories. So, anyway, I'm -- I mean -- I'm pleased with this song, because it's a fun song, but it's Zoë Lewis being political, as much as I am political in my music -- I mean, I am political, in a fun way. You know, people think, "Oh, she's just a funny songwriter," but, you know, you still say your things, you can ease them in, and get your points across -- get them to the people. I'm from a little village on the south coast of England -- I come from the seaside. Now I live in Provincetown, Cape Cod, also by the sea. I need to be living on the edge, and I always gravitate towards beautiful beach towns. Anyway. I love my nature, and, of course, you know, I find plastic all the time, walking on the beach, and pick it up -- have always done so -- traveled the world a lot -- went to India, not too long ago. Couldn't believe how much plastic was strewn all over the place. I mean, everywhere you go, you find it. So I volunteered for the Coastal Studies Center in Provincetown, and they did a beach clean, but it was a fascinating beach clean. I mean, it's pristine -- it looks pristine, at first sight, but when you go underneath the seaweed, and start searching, you'll find all the micro plastic. We found -- In Cape Cod, we get a lot of Maine fishing stuff, because so much is made of plastic -- things used to be made of rope in the old days. Now, you know, everything -- everything's plastic. We use so much plastics. We started documenting the different plastic -- every tiny piece -- the wrappers, the straws, the bottle caps, unidentifiable plastic Styrofoam ...

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

... on red balloons, plastic cups for plastic tea, just throw it all into the sea!

ZOË: Anyway, it was very interesting. At the end, you know, when you tally it all up, what you find are where the currents come from, you know, in different times of year, in different beaches on the Cape ... So, anyway, we brought a huge boat back, laden, from the tip of Cape Cod, to the main part of the land, and then, every year, I've been volunteering, and I was really moved by their work, and, you know, I started looking up statistics, and I was just blown away, and that's when I discovered 5 Gyres, which is a great organization, and the Gyres, you know, if you didn't know about them -- all the plastic that goes into the ocean, heads out to the currents, and there were five large gyres where the currents meet, and that's where all the plastic goes, and it never breaks down, because plastic doesn't break down, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So some call it plastic smog, some call it plastic soup. So I imagined the ocean full of plastic soup and, you know, I read a lot of stuff -- the North Pacific garbage patch -- they were saying that

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

There is an island the size of Texas a floating island of piles and piles of plastic

ZOË: Now, apparently, it's -- that's, you know, fabricated. But it's gigantic, anyway. And it's not really an island. It's just tons of swirling plastic. And I started looking up more about it, and about all the pollution, and the devastation it causes to the animals, and, you know, the oceans, ocean life -- the fish, of course, and the birds, and the mammals, and the -- They have done experim -- you know, cut the birds open, when they found a dead bird, and found so much plastic in its belly, albatrosses, and turtles, and I collected all the info, and I wrote my song, and it really kind of took off! I made a little video. it went viral, and it's used in schools now, and now I organize -- because, you know, because I sing it all the time, and and people come, and now I'm a advocate for cleaning beaches, and I organize beach cleans, and it just -- For me, it's just -- I don't even feel like joining an organization. I mean, I have played now for 5 Gyres, but, really, it's, like, we have the power! We can just pick up plastic ourselves! We can do it. I mean, if everyone just picked up a few bits, then the beautiful nature would be much better. We can make a dent in the plastic. But most importantly, really -- and particularly when I read about it -- you know, it's fine to pick up the plastic, but, really, we shouldn't use plastic. You know, always at the gigs, I'm given a plastic water bottle to drink from. And now i refuse it. I tell my band, don't -- We're not having wood, you know. So I have to make sure we've got glass, or we've got our own reusable water bottles. You know, you can stand up there and be a hypocrite. It's very easy to put be one.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

And the solution to this pollution? Stop using plastic, cut down on plastic

JAKE: Yeah. The tone of it is kind of like -- I mean it -- It reminds me -- You know, if you tweaked it a bit, it would be, like, a super villain song, right?

ZOË: [snorts]

JAKE: Because you can just sing it with such glee, and, yet it's about this terrible thing. Like, do you know what I'm talking about?

ZOË: Yeah. It's evil.

JAKE: Right.

ZOË: Yeah.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

And all the seagulls and the tiny turtles colossal whales are full of plastic

ZOË: And everyone's screaming out "No" by the end of the song, [laughs] because I make them.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

Do you want some soup? NO Would you like some soup? NO Fancy some soup? NO We don't want your soup!

ZOË: That's funny that it's a super villain song. Yeah, well, it's ominous. I mean, it's ominous, but, you know, I don't want to just say, "Oh, it's terrible. We're killing the Earth. Bye."

JAKE: Yeah.

ZOË: But, really, that's what the song's about, but it's in a Cole Porteresque sort of way, with funny rhymes. And you don't turn people off then, and it still gives you some hope that you can change the world, and that you can -- You can be positive, even though you're screaming "No!", and make a change.

JAKE: Mm-hmm. Did it have that kind of feel from the beginning?

ZOË: Well, you know, I'm English, so it's, like, "Would you like some soup? Fancy some soup?" You know, force feeding people soup, and you're, like, screaming "No!". And always like that part. You know, like, even though my music's not punk, I have a little punk rock in me, and I like to "No!", you know. I like to get people screaming "No!" and be angry. But, you know, with tongue in cheek. I mean, I had fun writing -- you know, I like to rhyme, and I had fun writing some of the lines, but, yeah. I knew it how it was going. When I get the chorus, I usually know how I'm going to add to it.

JAKE: Yeah. And it's also -- I feel like, I mean, that there are so many words in the song. I feel like the avalanche of words also kind of gets across this avalanche of plastic.

ZOË: Huh.

JAKE: I don't know. Is that --? A lot of these are connections that are made up in my mind, but I just sort of put them out there.

ZOË: Oh, good. I'm very -- I love -- I love that you think that. [laughter] Oh, yes, of course it was meant, then, to ... [laughter] No. I actually cut a verse at the end, because it was like, "Come on. It's getting too long." Because I was having fun. You know, this one just spilled off, and it was fun to write. I enjoyed it. I mean, I knew what I wanted to write. There's so many facts you could put in. I mean, it's quite factual, so, you know, basically, I'm just saying all the different creatures are full of plastic, and we're turning into plastic, you know, and it just -- from the food chain, and the jellyfishes, it just gets passed down. And it's a whole plastic society, anyway, and you can read that in so many ways, and we're getting so out of touch with nature. So, yeah, I knew. At this point it was clear.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

ZOË: I mean, it's just a simple song, but it was written -- I mean, I love the Cole Porter and the rhyming, and, my gosh, there's a lot of words, so if I start the song too fast, especially when I get to the bridge, like, I have a hard time breathing. [both laugh] And, what is it, I go:

Plastic bags, plastic wraps, plastic bottles, plastic caps, styrofoam and lobster traps North Pacific garbage patch! [takes a deep breath] plastic forks, plastic spoons, plastic string on red balloons, plastic cups for plastic tea, just throw it all into the sea!

So it's -- I have to keep calm, and not be too excited, before the song, otherwise I'm race-horsing through it. My favorite line is "Even the porpoise is feeling nauseous." I was pleased when nauseous rhymed with porpoise.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

even the porpoise is feeling nauseous because he can't digest the plastic soup and in the food chain....

ZOË: The porpoise feeling nauseous -- I do like it -- because when I deliver it in shows, I kind of linger, and people give me a little giggle. They give me a little titter at that point. I'm always pleased when a line works. You know, there's usually one point in a song, they like it. But I end, you know, even though it's all "No!", I end up saying, well, we can make a change, and we can -- You know, we've got to cut down on plastic! We can save the world. You know, when I organize beach cleans now, tons of people come, and it's really, it's fun, and then they start their own beach cleans, and then they -- You know, I did a gig in Boston, and the people were like, "Can we do a collection for the 5 Gyres?" "Yeah." You know, people -- It's my pet, you know, thing. People like to put me, they pair me with the plastic pollution now. It's Kind of like, that's what people think: "Hey! You're the beach clean one! Can you do that song?" You know.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOE: Good. So I like to -- That's one of the reasons why I chose it, when you asked me, too, because I can get the point across, too, through all the different media.

JAKE: Have you gotten any particularly memorable responses to this one?

ZOË: More that people buy the album, and go back and play it to their classrooms, you know.

JAKE: Yeah. ZOE: And, oh, I did have -- I was contacted from France! It made it to France, for some cleanup group, and they made a video of their beach plane, and they used the song, and then they use it on their website. You know, I always let everyone use it for free. And, yeah, it's out there. So, you never know where a song goes, and who's sharing it. You know, I like to get people to join me on stage, because it shows the more people that help, the more power, or louder, we can be, the more more noise we can make about it, and the more change we can achieve, and everyone's happy to yell "No!" No one wants to keep it like this. So it's universal.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: I mean, at least the ones who come to my gigs. [laughter] And you don't even have to make an organization. Just go and clean! People often come up to me in Provincetown. They say, "We thought of you the other day. We were dragging plastic off the beach." [chuckles] You know, and then other people are like, "Oh, yeah, since we heard your song, we're gonna go, and -- We always bring three pieces." Because sometimes I say, "Just bring three. You don't have to, you know, bring it all." I mean. But it gets quite addictive. You can't stop. You start seeing more and more of it, and then you can't -- it's -- I always tie it all together, and come back with huge amounts, and then have to call the Rangers and say, "Please, can you come pick it up," because they can't deal with it, you know.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: And then it goes to show -- And then they always put it on Facebook, and people are like, "Wow." You know, that's another way -- People are, "My God, you found all that stuff." So, I'm like, "Well, you just go and pick some, you'll soon find find a huge pile." So yes. I'm an optimistic, jovial, performer, but this is a bummer. [laughter] It certainly is.

JAKE: Yeah. It's a rough one.

ZOË: I also like to -- You know, try, for a whole gig, I take people on a roller coaster ride, and try and, you know, make some points, and then take them off on a humorous angle, and then hit them in the gut with an emotional song, and then be silly again. You know, it's life.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: It's life, and that's what I try and do in the show.

JAKE: Yeah. Is there a particular place that this tends to go in a set?

ZOË: Well, on the album, it's the second song. I usually build it -- Because it's got audience participation, I usually leave it till later on. If I'm doing two sets, I'll leave that to the penultimate song of the first set. Maybe near the end of the second set. Depends who's, you know, if there's kids, or what kind of, you know, I tailor-make it for the crowd, but I've had all sorts of people up.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

ZOË: I've had a whole ton of punk rockers, once, holding to 'No!" signs, and that was great.

JAKE: That sounds fantastic. ZOE: Yeah. [laughter]

JAKE: Because I feel like this song -- you know, it has -- It's not a kids song, per se -- like, there's some sophistication to it -- but I feel like kids also would enjoy, and get the message, and everything, so ...

ZOË: Yeah. I don't write "kids music." I just write music. But I do have a ton of kid fans. I would never want to talk down to kids, and simplify things. But the music's fun, and I find I have lots of kids who come to the shows, and, in the summer, when I play in Provincetown, we do outside gigs, and I have rows and rows of little ones in the front, wanting to come and join in. It's like -- Nowadays, kids music -- Well the, you know -- It's a huge moneymaker. And, you know, nowadays, there's bands that the parents quite like, too. In the old days, they didn't, they couldn't bear kids music. But, you know, I don't classify myself as kids music, but it's, like, for the kids in us. I'm very pleased the kids come. I do have a song called "The Day That Snow White Said The F Word," and that is the most popular song with school children, whether or not their parents like is another ...

JAKE: Not your problem!

ZOË: Not my problem! I don't actually say the F word.

JAKE: No.

[EXCERPT FROM 'SNOW WHITE' PLAYS:]

When she came down to Orlando, she was only just eighteen. Got a room in a condo complex, and a job inside her childhood dream, And she started as a teacup, and she made friends with the spool, and the theme park was an oyster, for her eyes were wider than the moon. And through the little window ...

JAKE: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

ZOË: OK. Well, you can go to www.zoelewis.com, and I've got all my albums up there, there's videos, I've written two musicals -- there's information on that -- and I do a 1920s show, too. And I'm touring all over the world, all the time, in between picking up plastic.

JAKE: Yes. And I saw Zoë when she performed in Providence, and that was a great show, so I recommend you seek her out!

ZOË: Hooray!

JAKE: So my name's Jacob Haller, and, if you're interested in my music, it's at music.jwgh.org, and I also have a kind of umbrella website at jacobhaller.com where you can find the music, and all my podcasts, and all the other crazy stuff I'm doing. Tell Me About Your Song has its own website at tellmeaboutyoursong.com, and you can find it and rate it in iTunes, and any place where podcast can be found, which I hope you do. And, with all that said, we're going to go out by listening to the song that we've been talking about in full: "Plastic Soup" by Zoë Lewis, from the album "The Sound of Wings." Thanks for listening!

["PLASTIC SOUP" PLAYS IN FULL]

JAKE: Yeah, and it's always kind of interesting -- like, you know, the song that she chose to talk about is one of the relatively serious ones, and

ZOË: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JAKE: It's interesting. I mean, I -- Most of my songs are kind of humorous, as well, so... ZOE: Mm-hmm.

JAKE: I think it's always interesting when someone with more of a humorous bent takes on, you know, something more serious than it --

ZOË: Yeah.

JAKE: It's --

ZOË: Well, it's -- I think it's, like, also when, I mean, if you just think quickly, when you're not, you know -- You think, "Oh, well, I'd better do that has some, that has a story to it. I've got to talk a while about it." [laughter] You know? It's like --

JAKE: Yes. [laughter]

ZOË: Eh. What can I say? I better be saying something important. [laughter]

JAKE: Yeah.

ZOË: Like, it's about a child's tadpole. I just saw a tadpole, and it was nice, so I wanted to write about it. [laughs] There we are! End of interview, thank you very much. [laughter]

JAKE: Yup. All right. This is the fifteen second --

ZOË: Yeah.

JAKE: -- episode that everyone's been waiting for.

ZOË: Yeah.

[myflowerfriends]

Final Blog Posts

Blog 7: Unsaturating the World

Figure 1: Saturation in boardwalk photo, https://www.adorama.com/alc/0008627/article/100-in-100-Dont-be-a-super-soaker-saturater

In photography, to saturate an image is to edit it so that all of the visible colors are intensified against the white; the right side of Figure 1 is saturated to bring out the vibrancy in the greens and blues. The lowest form of saturation is greyscale, where the photo loses all colors and becomes simple variations of white and blacks. I kept thinking of this term, saturation, while doing the readings for this week. It feels like humanity has taken hold of the saturation scale in Adobe Photoshop and is steadily turning the world greyer. This week’s post looks at the causes of biodiversity loss and extinction, particularly in chapters 9 and 10 of the textbook.

One of the first times I really felt a deep empathy for the environment was when I must have been about eight years old, and I was flipping through a magazine in my dad’s dental office. On the cover there was a polar bear, and on the inside there must have been an editor’s note that stressed how sad and absurd it was that the editor’s children might live to see a world where polar bears go extinct. It completely blew my mind. Polar bears going extinct?! But they’re such iconic animals!

Figure 2: Polar Bear on Time Magazine, 2006. Not sure if this was the exact magazine I was flipping through, but it carries the same energy. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20060403,00.html

What I didn’t realize then was that every twenty-four hours, between 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird, and mammal go extinct.[1] And according to Miller and Simmons’ text, “20-50% [is the] percentage of the earth’s known species that could disappear this century primarily because of human activities.”[2] The guilt on the shoulders of humankind should be there, but it is not. There is hardly any action being taken to preserve these species, or at least ease their suffering—and hardly any action being done to do the same for our human sisters and brothers.

“Given the pace and scale of change, we can no longer exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and irreversibly change living conditions on Earth.” [3]This quote comes from the World Wildlife Populations Down 50% in Last 40 Years video, which explains just what the title says. There are critical tipping points that are coming closer and closer to being reached each day, and very little being done to reduce the strain of these.

One way to remember the reasons that are causing this biodiversity loss is through HIPPCO: Habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation; Invasive (nonnative) species; Population growth and increasing use of resources; Pollution; Climate change; and Overexploitation. Habitat destruction is at this time the most common damaging action being taken, and is a difficult one to stop. It can be difficult to realize too; people in industrialized parts of the United States took great pity on the wildfires being burned in the Amazon Rainforest in late 2019, but were hypocritical to the land that was destroyed so that their city or suburb could be built.

This also reminds me of an interaction I saw on Instagram the other day. There was a post by National Geographic on how salmon are being overfished and losing their wild habitat. One of the top comments stated something along the lines of, “this is why we need to farm salmon! Stop fishing in the wild, it’s the only way to protect them!” And it made me think, because if the problem is that isolated—salmon in the wild are disappearing, so just eat the ones that are farmed—then that would work, maybe. But the issue with salmon, or any species, is that they do not exist in a vacuum. They are an integral part of ecosystems in their natural habitats; farming salmon would eliminate a lot of the benefits that salmon have in the wild.

I was just having a discussion with my brother about this too, and we started making a list of things: what if cows were wild? Would they look the same or had hundreds of years of domestication made them softer and bigger, as chickens have become? Farms make evolution work differently.

As do zoos. Is there any real chance of zoos integrating animals back into the wild? I support animal education, and I get that it’s easier to study animals in zoos than in the wild sometimes.

Figure 3: A photo I took in February, 2019 of the South African Lion and Safari Park website where they acknowledge that they do not feel comfortable with their own lion-petting exhibits but continue to have them for economic purposes. The website has since been renovated and this page was completely removed.

But zoos tend to really get me questioning their ethics. Are they necessary for people to understand why it’s necessary to protect them, or is watching high quality documentaries enough to give humans a change of heart? I had a huge fallout with some friends of mine while we were studying abroad in South Africa because they went to a Lion Park where lions are bred and adults are euthanized.  I heard lots of, “but you connect with the animals! You learn to respect them for their conservation! They do scientific research there!” And then the question is, how different is using horses for entertainment? Is it not practically the same as breeding lions for human entertainment? This isn’t the section of the course dedicated to philosophy, but the unanswered questions remain, bring the choice back to whether we will keep the turning the world grey or work on brightening its diversity.

The Critical Thinking Question #5 on page 218 is a tough one: what would you do if a wild boar invaded and tore up your yard or garden?

Currently my dad is having an issue where these strange moth-type bugs build cocoons on the pine trees separating our house from our neighbors. They’re killing the pine trees, because when they make their cocoons, they eat the needles. My dad asked me, as an environmental studies major, what the best option would be: let the bugs take over the trees and once they turn brown, cut them down? Or use pesticides to kill the trees?

Critical Thinking Question # 5 on page 250 asks: Are you in favor of establishing more wilderness areas in the United States?

To that I say: YES TO MORE WILDERNESS AREAS!!!! More old growth forests means more biodiversity! Any disadvantages would just be hidden advantages; for example, less room for suburban sprawl would give more space for the earth to heal.Less private space allows for more public space, which can be used by humans, vegetations, and wildlife.  

WC:1189

Question: It is interesting too, that some species are considered accidentally introduced/invasive. Are humans accidentally introduced to places, or do we make possible the ability to sustain life on any corner of the earth because we were designed to do that?

Blog 8: Eat or Be Eaten.

Aquatic Biodiversity Loss and Extinction

Figure 1: Lake Erie, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/piro/learn/nature/images/Waves-on-shore_1.jpg?maxwidth=1200&autorotate=false

Unless you have seen one of the Great Lakes with your own eyes, you cannot fathom what they are really like: vast, powerful bodies of water, with big waves and long stretches of sandy beaches; comparable to an ocean. I grew up living about a block away from Lake Erie, and when I was younger, I really hated my hometown. I wanted to live in a big city. My parents countered my arguments by emphasising how lucky we were to live in the Great Lakes Basin. It wasn’t until I attended a March for Science that I realised how important it was to protect the lakes — see me pictured below with my generic sign, and my friend Max holding a sign that my mom crafted; she’s the one taking the photo.

Figure 2: Cleveland’s March for Science Protest, 2017. Photo by author.

Part of my love of the Great Lakes, and of open bodies of water in general, comes from me living so close to them. But as Sylvia Earle is quoted in the beginning of chapter 12, “With every drop of water you drink, with every breath you take, you are connected to the sea, no matter where on Earth you live” (253).[1] Even if you live in a desert, every decision you make can in some way affect aquatic ecosystem services. Take, for example, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Figure 3: Eastern Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 2019.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottsnowden/2019/05/30/300-mile-swim-through-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-will-collect-data-on-plastic-pollution/#4b2a7f36489f

There are actually two large garbage patches with some connecting debris in-between them; the greater of these patches is just off the coast of California, and is about 600,000 square miles, and in some areas, several feet deep. It is an island floating on the surface of the water, made up of plastics and microplastics. Because plastic is not biodegradable, the Garbage Patch continues to grow, and many animals, such as the albatross pictured below, die due to ingestion of these plastics, which Chris Jordan documents hauntingly well in the film Albatross.[2]

Figure 4: Albatross Bodies with Plastic, 2018,

https://www.albatrossthefilm.com/ourstory

One thing that I think could have been better written about in this chapter is water distribution. I stumbled through this very briefly in my presentation while explaining biophilia and the damaging effects of trying to make Las Vegas into an oasis in the desert. I understand that this chapter is focused more on the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems, but I still think that concept 11.5 of this chapter could go more in depth with the ownership rights of water sources, or perhaps the section on the Great Lakes in the previous section could explain how although the Great Lakes are the largest collective body of freshwater in the world, water diversions are pretty much limited to regions within the Great Lakes Basin, and why it is important that it stays that way.

Critical Thinking Question #2, p. 280:

Three Greatest Threats to Aquatic Biodiversity

1.     Ocean Acidification

2.     Plastic Pollution

3.     Coastal Wetland and Watershed Protection

4.     Overfishing (if there are fish left after the above 3 are increased!)

The list above is my answer to the Critical Thinking Question for this chapter. All of them are caused by humans on the land. The greatest threat according to me is that of ocean acidification, or the increasing amounts of heat and acidity in the oceans. This stems from increased Co2 in the atmosphere. One of the main factors contributing to that, is animal agriculture.

Soil, Agriculture, and Food

Figure 5: You Can Smell the Methane in This Photo, 2014

https://www.wilderutopia.com/health/cowspiracy-animal-agriculture-despoils-land-water-and-climate/

Chapter 12 in the textbook discusses the effect of food production on the environment. I act like I know a lot about this when people ask me why I’m a vegetarian, but this chapter was full of great information and details that I didn’t fully understand until now.

The issue with animal agriculture is not only that Co2 is basted into the atmosphere through gasses released form the animals and humans which eat them, and the clearing of land for the animals. With the depletion of biodiversity to allow animals grazing land, vital natural habitats for other species are lost, as shown in George Monbiot’s brief video on rewilding the countryside and rural areas.[3]

Truthfully, I expected the chapter to be much more focused on animal agriculture alone. But other forms of farming are nearly as bad, as pictured below.

Figure 6: Effects of Food Production of Any Sort

https://slideplayer.com/slide/6187595/

I’m also glad that the chapter covered a comparison of overnutrition and malnutrition. I found the quote: “We live in a world where, according to the WHO, about 795 million people face health problems because they do not get enough nutritious food to eat and at least another 2.1 billion (29% of the human population) have health problems stemming largely from eating too much sugar, fat, and salt.”[4] The greed of modern civilization never ceases to amaze me.

Critical Thinking Question #1 p. 320

Figure 7: Vertical Harvest of Jackson Hole, 2013.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2056017617/vertical-harvest-of-jh-a-growing-system-for-change

If I were a member of Growing Power Inc. and in charge of turning an abandoned shopping center into an organic farm, I would begin by getting a perfect team together; potentially including some of the students in this class (networking!). I’d do my best to dismantle the concrete and debris of the shopping center, and reuse whatever I was able to on the spot. As it is in the Case Study, my farm would be powered partly by solar electricity and solar hot water systems, and would be structured like a green house to keep the produce supported year round. As it is in Jackson Hole’s Vertical Harvest organic urban farm, my employee positions would first be open to disabled peoples who are working on communication skills, training in this center for jobs elsewhere.[5] We would be deeply integrated into the community, selling our produce locally and donating to food banks and soup kitchens whenever possible. That sounds too good to be true, but we’ll leave it at that.

Question, and I think about this every day: which is better for the environment, to be vegan and avoid animal products entirely but eat non-local tofu or other forms of meatless protein; or to eat only locally sourced food which would make animal products more of a staple to the diet?

WC: 1156

[1] Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. Living in the Environment. Chapter 11: Sustaining Aquatic Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. 19th ed. Boston, MA: Engage Learning, 2020.

[2] Jordan, Chris. Albatross. https://www.albatrossthefilm.com

[3] Smith, Peter. “George Monbiot on reqilding countryside and rural areas” YouTube, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1KW-0YbO3Q

[4] Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. Living in the Environment. Chapter 12: Food Production and the Environment, p. 286. 19th ed. Boston, MA: Engage Learning, 2020.

[5] “Vertical Harvest Jackson Hole,” Vertical Harvest,  https://www.verticalharvestjackson.com/our-mission.

Blog 9: Fight the System by Appreciating Soil and Supporting Local Farmers !

Symphonies of the Soil

Figure 1: Cover Artwork, 2012, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2229397/

When I began watching this documentary, I braced myself for what I thought was going to be a long, boring hour-and-a-half. But by the end of it, I think it may have changed the trajectory of my summer plans.

The first half of the documentary is an almost meditative description of different types of soils found across planet earth, backed by an orchestral score. Ironically, one of the first phrases of the narrator is: “most of the planet is non-living.”[1]And it is. As my sister pointed out, even humans are mostly CHON: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Yet plots of land are not 100% soil; half of it is the compounds that make up soil, and half of it consists of spaces for air, water, and microorganisms which use soil to survive.

Figure 2: Andy Foraging for Mushrooms in Washington, 2019, photo by author.

This point leads to another: you cannot grow good produce in a void. If you were to strip a type of soil down to its purest form and attempt at planting anything in it, it likely would not be successful. This seems to be the thesis of the second half of the documentary: farmers need to feed soil the natural ingredients it needs to be nutritional.

As I don’t have a very strong science background, some of this went over my head, such as the part about the lupines and nitrogen fixation. This summer, as long as the pandemic settles down, I hope to get an internship or job working in permaculture or vertical harvesting. It’s very odd to me that I can talk so much about the environment but know so little about it in a physical way. Although I try to shop mostly locally or from farmers markets, the development I grew up in didn’t allow gardens aside from flower beds, so I have had very little connection to soil or the ground I live on.

A critique I have of this film is that they paid very little attention to indigenous practices of cultivating soil, or hunter-gatherer ideas. They looked at how the harmful processes began, with civilizations in Europe flattening out the hillsides and beginning monocrop farming during the agricultural revolution, and they did discuss the Law of Return, but I thought there might be more references with how the soil had been used in previous human populations, and perhaps a discussion on primitivism. The discussion that was had in the film was more focused on finding a structured form of rewilding agriculturally, which I support, but still I thought the film could show the other side, and give more credit to the indigenous groups that have been pushing for this rewinding for centuries.

Figure 3: Stone Age Reenactment Group, http://www.jutulskinn.no/stone-age-gathering.

No matter how far you think society should dive into with a return to primitivism, the message of this video is clear: we can do a better job at how we farm, in order to produce healthier more sustainable products. It feels as though this shouldn’t be too difficult—but with the rigid constraints set forth by the corporations involved in the agricultural industry, farmers have very little say in how their crops get produced, and animals have become far removed from from the agricultural process, removing a great source of natural fertilizer as well. The next film explains that a bit more.

Food, Inc.

Figure 4: Food, Inc. Cover Image, 2008, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/mediaviewer/rm3514966016.

Food, Inc. uses various segments to explain the systems put in place to produce food, and how rigid those constraints are within the law-and-order system of the United States of America. These segments range from showing statistics, interviews, and video clips of what the world of agriculture is really like.

I found the Polyface Farms clips to be fascinating, because it was so difficult to watch and listen to, but was still the best possible scenario for meat farming. The cattle fertilize and mow the variety of greens they eat; there are no shipments of corn that have to be made. As Joel says, “it’s all real solar dollars….we’re every bit as efficient, especially if you plug in all of the inefficiencies of the industrial system.” [2]

Figure 5: Joel at Polyface Farms, http://www.temeats.com/polyface-farms/.

I think this will be the hardest connection for people to make, especially because we need food to sustain ourselves. Someone can be addicted to nicotine and cut it out of their lives, or can choose to avoid it altogether. But they cannot simply ignore food. People can ignore bad food, but the temptation is always lingering as a possibility, and if you grew up like I did—eating processed foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until I was about sixteen and realized I needed to be healthier—breaking away from those habits can feel like the single most challenging thing to accomplish. And when fast food is the only option due to income levels, the cycle gets even more challenging to break.

Figure 6: Elk in Wyoming, https://content.osgnetworks.tv/petersenshunting/content/photos/bull-elk-bugling.jpg

I am reminded of an argument that put me on bad terms with my boss at my summer job as a waitress at a guest ranch near Jackson, Wyoming. Elk lived in the meadows just outside the property and were hunted and sold locally. One of our most popular items on the menu was elk tenderloin, and once I had a guest ask how local the elk we served was, a reasonable assumption as our website says that our kitchen sources locally and is as sustainable as possible, even though the menu does not specify what is or is not local. Upon speaking with the head chef I learned that the elk was actually shipped in, frozen, from Austria. The more getting-into-everybody-else’s-business that I did, the more I realized that the only ingredients we used that weren’t shipped in from Sysco were a weak amount of herbs from the farmers market. That guest was from Philadelphia and could have had fresher elk had he shipped it from Austria to Pennsylvania rather than Austria to Utah to Wyoming.

Along with that, our menu was incredibly meat-and-potatoes based, following exactly the prediction that humans are hard-wired to crave salt, fat, and sugar.

Something my mom makes fun of me for saying all the time is “it’s supply and demand!” as if all the problems in the world could be that simple. But in truth, they can be. And I hope that just as my generation has severely damaged the tobacco industry, the next generation can put an end to big corporations controlling the food industry, so that 30% of the United States’ land base will not be corn, and the choice between medication or buying vegetables will be unfathomable, and local food companies will overrule the 4 major meat companies in charge now.

A critique I have of Food, Inc. is that there is very little said about the dairy and fishing industries. I felt that there could have been an additional segment on those in the film—perhaps they aren’t as bad as the meat and corn industries, but I do not feel as though they are righteous enough to be counted out of this conversation.

I also am a bit confused by the Monsanto segment and hope to discuss that in our class time.

Question: Food, Inc. is very focused on the United States of America. What are food systems like in other parts of the world? Is there a correlation between colonized places having more fast-food?

WC: 1257

[1] Garcia, Deborah Koons, director. Symphony of the Soil. YouTube, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZVKMe2FTg.

[2] Kenner, Robert, et al. Food, Inc. 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smk2xq2l3Ig

Blog 10: The Health of the Environment, The Health of Humans

Figure 1, COVID-19 illustration, https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/11/disease-caused-by-the-novel-coronavirus-has-name-covid-19/

This week’s focus is on hazards and waste on human health and the environment. Chapter 17 in the textbook begins with a discussion on diseases stimulated from biological and chemical hazards and how these can be linked with environmental causes. The chapter ends with a discussion on risks, and how decision making can affect the world around us.

One of the most frustrating, common, and powerful diseases is cancer. Cancer’s direct cause in an individual is unknown. The title of the article “Breast Cancer: prevention or Cure? Why Is Breast Cancer Awareness/Cure Run By Major Chemical Companies?” gives good insight to the confusion around cancer research. The article goes on to explain the intricacies behind cancer research and bring to light the distrust that many people rightfully have towards corporations that are in control of cancer funding and research. Again, I see these problems tying so deeply into capitalism: individuals finding ways for their own selves to be as successful as possible without working towards the greater good.

Ethics always comes in to play and is very noticeable in this chapter. If malaria is such a murderous disease, and malaria is spread by mosquitoes, how bad would it be to just completely wipe out the mosquito population? I admit that I will appreciate any bug that lands on me, or gently flick them off, unless they are a mosquito. I do not like the inconvenience of mosquito bites, and killing mosquitoes gives me a weird sort of satisfaction that I could not achieve from the death of any other living being. In my biology class last semester, we looked at a case study of several scientists who were considering wiping out mosquitoes entirely in areas of the world susceptible to malaria. After long debates, no conclusion was reached. It feels wrong to eliminate a species that is annoying to us—if this is possible, then who’s going to stop the wolves in the western United States from eating cattle on ranches encroaching on their wild territory? At the same time, this could be a heroic achievement and an extreme stress-reliever for humankind.

These things seem like such simple solutions: page 455 of the textbook lists some ways to avoid exposure to hormone disrupters. Yet the article of the man who eliminated plastic from his life yet still got microplastics from his milk which was stored in a mason jar but filtered through a plastic lining proves that even when trying desperately to follow that advice, it is still just about impossible to be rid of them completely.

Figure 2, Microplastics Diagram, https://www.java-biocolloid.com/event/the-threads-of-microplastics-in-food-8721

I recently read the chapter “The Indian Healer” out of The Indian Giver, a book by Jack Weatherford in which he goes through the various ways that Native American peoples have contributed to modern medical technology or found the basis for medications. Native American practices of healing should be can be used to encourage well-being in medical practices, so as to put into action ways that advance views on the interconnectedness of community, the environment, and medicine overall.

I can’t help but think of what it felt to be alive before the industrial period began. I generally do feel better when I have spent some time in fresh air—but any fresh air in this day and age still has toxins in and around it, and no food nor water is completely free of microplastics or

A quick critique I have about all the extra informational videos and articles is that although they are very interesting, they are quite outdated. In other classes I am not allowed to cite articles older than five years old, and all of these are from the mid 2000s. I understand needing to learn the history of how we perceive chemicals in the body, but there was no range for that either. I’m curious as to what research has been put out within the last few years—or months.

CTQ #7 on p. 468 asks to name some risks that I face and how to eliminate or reduce those risks. This causes me to check my privilege once again; even when I come across pollution, I will likely have access to the best healthcare to heal me from whatever risks may concern me. There are risks that I can avoid, but that I still choose; I have chosen to live in Manhattan, with all its pollution, instead of living in a pristine area out west. Yet perhaps my education in New York will allow me to strengthen my ties with academia so that I can preserve those lands out west.

Solid and Hazardous Waste

I also recently read Waste Seige: the Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, who’s covering the discussions behind environmental, economic, and social issues that in occupied Palestine. Through illegal occupation, Israeli settlers are forcing neo-capitalist practices in the area, leading to more forced consumption, leading to more waste in an area that cannot contain it, and does not have the finances nor the leadership to create more sustainable waste options, such as those shown in the textbook. Palestine has become a literal dumpsite, and the effects of the toxins in the various wastes infiltrating the area is murderous. There is an ironic “Polluter Pays Principle” in use, where the governmental organizations have Palestinians pay higher taxes because technically they are the ones who are polluting—it is their sewer systems overflowing, their land that has the burning dump sites, and their people who are being cheap, non-sustainable products. Ironically, the sewers are flooding because Israeli-settler waste flows directly into them as well; landfills in that region are almost all located in designated Palestinian areas; and the suffocation of the economic process in Palestine keeps their people from having any upward mobility.

Figure 3, Landfill in Palestine, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel-s-solution-for-expelled-bedouin-between-garbage-and-junkyard-1.6158225

CTQ #1 p. 600: List three products you use and make them cradle-to-cradle.

The past two years I have begun having an immense feeling of guilt if I purchase something that isn’t made sustainably, or that isn’t able to be recycled or composted. When I need to buy something new (key word: need), I spend a lot of time looking into which company I can trust. I get most of my products from Package Free Shop. But as I keep saying, it goes back to economics. I’m sure anyone who uses their shampoo and conditioner bars and natural face oils would prefer it over whatever drugstore brand they use currently, but that price difference is what makes it so unreachable. To circle back, this is highlighted in Chapter 17’s discussion on HIV: lifesaving drugs are expensive, and simply cost too much to be used widely both in less-developed countries and in impoverished areas of industrialized countries.

Question: With marijuana becoming a much more common recreational and medicinal drug, I would have appreciated an unbiased discussion of it in this chapter, instead of it being left out completely. Does smoking marijuana affect your lungs as badly as smoking tobacco? Are there any studies being done on dab pens, which include THC but don’t include nicotine like traditional vape pens?

WC: 1105

Blog 11: Water (cont.)

Had I been patient with blog 8, I may have realized that there would be a whole other blog dedicated to water, filling in the gaps that I felt were left out in the previous readings—chapter 20 really digs into the inefficiencies of Ohio water treatment. This is that blog post, looking at chapters 13 and 20 in the textbook.[4]

Figure 1. Water Dispersal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_resources

Chapter 13: Water Resources

Water is stored in many ways in the earth’s surface, but only 0.024% of the earth’s water is readily available as a liquid freshwater. Due to climate change, areas that are dry are becoming drier, and areas that are oversaturated are becoming wetter and with saltwater, not freshwater. With that small percentage of water that is usable to humans, about 70% is used to irrigate cropland and raise livestock.

Industrialized nations in particular treat water as if it is free; Miller and Spoolman note that “we have no substitute for this vital form of natural capital” (325). Things that don’t seem to be made of water need large amounts of it in order to be produced, such as blue jeans and lettuce; producing a quarter-pound hamburger takes about 2,400 liters of freshwater. “About 66% of the freshwater used in the world and about 50% of the freshwater used in the United States is lost through evaporations, leaks, and inefficient use” (342).  Water really is our most necessary resource, and we absolutely take it for granted.

The United States has lots of freshwater resources, particularly in the eastern states. The book reads, “the United States has more than enough renewable freshwater to meet its needs. However, it is unevenly distributed and much of it is contaminated by agricultural and industrial practices” (329). Freshwater shortages are becoming more common and will continue to expand as climate change increases. Aquifers are losing their water faster than the rain is refilling them—in some parts of the United States, four times as fast—and much of this water being taken out is going to waste. There are other frightening results that come from too much groundwater being pulled out of the earth, such as sinkholes, as pictured in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Sinkhole in Guatemala City, 2007. https://www.businessinsider.com/giant-sinkhole-photos-2014-9

There is an option of tapping deep aquifers that lie beneath the surface of the ocean, but this is dangerous in that they are nonrenewable on a human timeline, little is known about what effects doing this may have, no international treaties govern these areas yet, the costs are unknown, and the water is likely still contaminated with some salt, arsenic, and uranium.

Dams are also not an ideal way to increase water supplies, because even though they help humans in many ways, they can destroy the natural environment in many ways, which in turn brings destruction to humans after a matter of time. Desalination is another option, albeit a costly and perhaps inefficient one, though more research is being done in the search to find better desalination technology.

The 4 R’s of recycling (refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle) may be the best way to work with water. Refusing unnecessary amounts of water, and reducing one’s usage of necessary water, are two prime first steps to take when trying to heal water issues. Part of what will make this easier for people to remember to follow is if water is treated by society as a necessity, through higher prices of freshwater (and perhaps a Universal Basic Income – style user pays approach) and redirecting government subsidies to being more efficient. Simple household changes, such as installing low-flow toilets, fixing leaks as soon as they are noticed, and redesigning lawns and outdoor spaces with vegetation that suits the ecoregion can also help limit the amount of freshwater wasted. Vaster options can include incorporating infrastructures in communities that reuse greywater in areas that are able.

Water has no substitute. Sure, you can drink LaCroix or Coke Zero and treat that as your liquid intake for the day, but freshwater is at the base of those items. Without some form of h2o in our systems, humans would not survive for more than a few days.

Chapter 20: Water Pollution

The previous chapter had its focus on freshwater, and how to be efficient with it. This one focuses on what happens if that freshwater gets polluted. In some parts of the world, mercury, pathogens, metals, and other nutrients can kill people drinking the water if it is not treated properly. In some areas, this does not directly affect humans intake, but can affect humans lives in other ways—for example, all of northeast Ohio becoming a laughing stock when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in the late 1960’s (see Figure 3).

Figure 3, Cuyahoga River fire recolored, June 1969. https://1960sdaysofrage.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/burn-on-big-river-cuyahoga-river-fires/

But in the textbook, Miller and Spoolman start this discussion of as saying that the Cuyahoga River fires were a success story. I rode my bike by the Cuyahoga River just the other day and it was not ablaze—there were fishermen and ducks in it. Still, most of the world’s major riverways are heavily polluted, with “80-90% of the raw sewage in most cities in less developed countries [is] discharged directly into waterways” (548). Yet there is hope that these rivers can heal, though it will take a tremendous amount of strength from the humans who have caused this incredible pollution in the first place.

Balance is another important factor into keeping water clean. No water, not even the “clean” water humans drink, is pure h20—that would kill us. We need small traces of other elements in it too. Too many nutrients, though, can lead to eutrophication, which is when a shallow body of water has too many nutrients, causing dense growths of organisms which decompose and suffocate the body of water, giving it a greenish-teal color.

Question:  Why are some mountain lakes so brightly colored? Does it have to do with eutrophication, even if they are pristine?

WC: 1112

Blog 12: Future, No Future

Figure 1: Protestors rally against pipelines being put into Wet’suwet’en land in Canada

First off, I would like to disagree with Justin Trudeau’s statement made at the Houston Energy Conference in 2017 where he says that “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” I would like to believe that I, and many people with unselfish morals dedicating their lives to environmental justice, would let those oil barrels STAY IN THE GROUND.

I was surprised that Trudeau was the one to say it, as when I was younger, I thought he could do no evil; I was quite a little liberal. But now I see his desire for economic greed showing through his attempted democracy, just as I thought the Paris Climate Agreement was exactly what the world needed, and now see that there’s a lot of flimsy rhetoric in there. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, the reading:

Chapter eleven of Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocenetells how there are three possible future for the world: continued consumer capitalist development, collapse, or a new mode of living. [5]

Continue

Figure 2: Consumerism, http://links.org.au/node/1972

I think it’s interesting that they even gave continued consumer capitalist development a chance—I feel as though they could have just grouped that with collapse. I recognize that not many people (ie. My family who I am quarantined with) think the way I do, so I am glad they gave the explanation. Business as usual cannot continue. We are heading for collapse.

I suppose in some kind of sense, you could say that it can continue. But that’s because what’s continuing isn’t really capitalism in the first place. The small changes are already being had. For example, our right-wing president is dishing out monetary stimulus checks to bolster the economy, which smells a lot like socialism to me (delicious).

Lewis and Maslin explain our current economic system as being driven by positive feedback loops which end in fundamental changes. The factors which underlid all human societies are changing faster and faster as time moves onwards—it is true exponential growth. It is consumers acting as though we have infinite resources even while living on a finite planet. It is contradictory. But even in it’s core, our current system is one of change.

Perhaps the change requires all cars to be electric, but the increase in demand for electric cars requires an increase in demand for the lithium mined in Bolivia. Maybe there is no realistic, futuristic plan to put in place that will efficiently and sustainably save the world. Maybe I just need to read up more on this. Lewis and Maslin do offer some good suggestions, though, including Universal Basic Income and Half-Earth.

A New Way of Life?

Figure 3: Half-Earth website screenshot, https://www.half-earthproject.org

Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the Half-Planet theory are the two most clearly stated pathways for success of our planet that we have studied thus far.

UBI: I know a lot of professors don’t like to talk about their politics, but I was trying to figure out where yours lie as someone who knows so much about the interweaving’s of politics and the environment. A few months ago you dropped that you were a big proponent of UBI, and I thought, “aha! so Andrew Yang is the one who will save the environment!” But my impression of Yang’s UBI felt more focused on Artificial intelligence—I really just didn’t know a lot about UBI in general. (side note: I am REALLY excited for it to be summer so I can stop having deadlines and start just immersing myself in the random topics I want to learn more about. This course gave me a lotta suggestions.) After reading about it in this chapter, I think that UBI is really promising. Lewis and Maslin state that, “[UBI] breaks the link between work and consumption; we could work less and consume less and still meet our needs…those working in the fossil fuel industry would have the security of income to retrain” (406). This sounds incredibly promising, but there are still questions involving culture (some people feel more “manly” working in a coal mine) and how this would play out with refugees and non-citizens residing in the United States, etc. Still, I think a solid attempt at integrating this into our economy would help the world in lots of ways.

Half Earth: I am very interested in the idea of giving half the earth to other species, and perhaps indigenous groups as well. Again, I look at the suburbs and think of how seemingly easy it would be to develop rewilding techniques. All it would take is one popular suburban mom changing her front lawn from monoculture bluegrass to being a large garden—or whatever a local environmental rewilding consultant would suggest—and the rest of the neighborhood would follow suit. Half-Earth may seem like an enormous task to take on, but I genuinely have faith that it is possible.

Collapse

Figure 4: Quarantine Meme That My Mom Thought Was Real, https://www.boredpanda.com/nature-healing-quarantine-jokes/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

As an environmental studies and anthropology double-major, people would ask me where those two overlap. I even felt that I was choosing two very different subjects because I was so scatter brained—I’d study a little about the environment, a little about humans, and figure out what I was going to do with that somewhere along the way. I let myself feel belittled for choosing two of the “easiest” subjects—no intense economics, no organic chemistry to work through. Just a lot of thinking too much about things which some people may consider completely irrelevant, a task which I am very good at. So it made me feel a lot better when, I believe it was you Dr. Kindervater, who said: “These two scientists think there is time for economic and political changes to save human kind. Culturally, though, do we believe it?”

For a long time I really thought that collapse was the only path our planet was headed towards—that Jane Goodall was bullshitting us all with her Reasons For Hope, and that if Bernie Sanders didn’t become president and begin balancing out the wealth gap and making changes to environmental legislation, then we might as well all be dead now and let whatever remaining species reclaim the earth before we make them go extinct too. I guess, if you’re someone who prefers life over death, (and I suppose we are all those types of people as even if we want to kill ourselves, we haven’t done it yet!) the we might as well have hope for the future, and continue working towards the new path.

“With great power comes great responsibility” is a quote from Uncle Ben in the Spiderman series, which Peter Parker/Spiderman keeps close to his heart as he begins to realize his powers, and is constantly questioned with the choice to use them selfishly or for the greater good. With increased technology, humankind collectively has the power to transform the earth or destroy it. I hope that soon we recognize what is at stake with our planet, and learn how to efficiently reduce the destruction being caused. It might not bring dolphins into the heat ponds of Washington D.C., but it would certainly allow for a lot of other miracles to happen.

Question:  My concern with UBI is, how can you make sure that people aren’t spending it irresponsibly? Would it be better to just raise the minimum wage, or expand the amount available for people to get food stamps and free healthcare? Would UBI allow people to get their basic needs met, or would it provide for spending money on sustainable/fair trade products?

WC: 1251

[1] Vidal, John. “UN Environment Program: 200 Species Go Extinct Every Day, Unlike Anything Since Dinosaurs Disappeared 65 Million Years Ago,” Huffpost May 2011. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/un-environment-programme-_n_684562

[2] Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. Living in the Environment. Chapter 23: Economics, Environment, and Sustainability. 19th ed. Boston, MA: Engage Learning, 2020.

[3] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x26ybub

[4] Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott Spoolman. Living in the Environment . 19th ed. S.l.: Cengage Learning, 2018.

[5] Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Chapter 11: Can Homo Dominates Become Wise?” The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Yale University Press, pp. 367–416.

[vikmali-blog]

The Need for Aquatic Biodiversity [FINAL]

          Many aquatic ecosystems, such as coral reefs, have been and continue to be destroyed by human activities to the point where there is an ongoing sixth mass extinction. Just like terrestrial ecosystems, the acronym HIPPCO (habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation; Invasive species; Population growth and increasing use of resources; Pollution; Climate change; and Overexploitation) demonstrates how human activities threaten the aquatic biodiversity and the ecosystem services (Miller 255). Aquatic coastal habitats are being destroyed at rates from 2 to 10 times higher than the average rate of tropical rainforests being destroyed. According to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, about half of the world’s coral reef have been destroyed and degraded. In 20 to 40 years, another 25% to 33% of coral reefs could be destroyed and degraded (Miller 255). Because of the degradation of aquatic ecosystems, species on land such as albatross and humans are suffering. Many people forget that ecosystems on land need aquatic ecosystems to work in conjunction.

Figure 1. Coral Reefs: The picture in the left demonstrates how biodiverse coral reefs are. The picture in the right demonstrates a dead coral reef lacking any sort of biodiversity (Miller 256).

         One of the biggest threats to coral reefs is a process known as coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is when “warmer ocean waters can cause shallow tropical corals to expel their colorful algae and leave behind white coral” (Miller 255). Because of human activity, excessive carbon dioxide is added into the air faster than it can be removed by the carbon cycle. As a result, carbon dioxide is taken up by the ocean. The more carbon dioxide taken up, the more acidic the ocean becomes. The dissolved carbon dioxide combines with water to form carbonic acid increasing hydrogen ions and decreasing pH. More hydrogen ions means that there would be less carbonate ions available for the coral reefs to grow due to the attraction between these two ions to form bicarbonate ions (Miller 257). In other words, increased dissolved carbon dioxide levels in oceans results in warming and the acidification plays a role in “dissolving the calcium carbonate that coral polyps use to build the reefs” (Miller 256). Not only does warmth and acidity affect the chemistry and growth of coral reefs, but these two factors “could also boost populations of some species such as the coral-eating thorn-of-crown starfish that poses a threat to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef” (Miller 260). With all of these human induced changes, there is not enough time for coral reefs to adapt.

Figure 2. Carbonate Availability: As more carbon dioxide is produced, more of it is taken up by the ocean, which results in increase is hydrogen ions. These hydrogen ions eventually reacts with carbonate ions leaving none for coral reefs to use for growth. The left Earth is the optimal amount of carbonate available in the late 1800s and the right Earth is the low amount of carbonate available by 2100 (Miller 257).

         There were five mass extinctions that took place on Earth, and with each mass extinction, coral reefs disappeared and came back after four million to ten million years. If a sixth mass extinction were to occur, many of the coral species that are the key-species of aquatic biodiversity will disappear as well decreasing the overall biodiversity (Miller 256). Regarding marine biodiversity, scientists have observed that “the greatest marine biodiversity occurs around coral reefs, in estuaries, and one the deep-ocean floor” (Miller 255). Coral reefs is just one example demonstrating the need for aquatic biodiversity.

         If we look at the basic facts, we see that Earth is considered to be a “water planet” consisting of 71% of its surface covered with salt-water with an average depth of 2.3 miles. Many of us don’t realize how connected we are to the bodies of water on Earth. It amazed me how  “with every drop of water you drink, with every breath you take, you are connected to the sea, no matter where on Earth you live” (Miller 253). We need to maintain aquatic diversity in order for us to survive. Maintaining aquatic diversity is needed for economic, health related, and ecological reasons. There are roughly 850 million jobs in fishing and ocean tourisms. Forty percent of world population gets fifteen to twenty percent of their protein from seafood. More than half of the oxygen that we are breathing right now is all due to the ocean. By absorbing a quarter of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities, oceans slow the rate of climate change. Moreover, oceans absorb roughly ninety percent of heat added by humans from the atmosphere (Miller 255). Species on land are so dependent on the Earth’s bodies of water and its species. This can be seen with the albatross video.

         Albatross are birds that eat seafood. In this video that we were required to see in class, Chris Jordan demonstrates the problem with albatross. Albatross are dying due to the consumption of small items which include bottle caps, lighters, and even keys. These items were floating among the North Pacific shore. Seeing these birds not being able to fly made me so upset. Because of our littering and because of our lack of care for the ocean, these birds are suffering (Jordan). Albatross is one of many species that are currently suffering because of harmful  human activities.

         Through laws and regulation, we can help mitigate the changed in Earth’s bodies of waters to maintain aquatic biodiversity. Initiatives include “using laws and economic incentives to protect species, setting aside marine reserves to protect ecosystems and ecosystem services, and using community-based integrated coastal management” (Miller 267).  Managing fisheries could be one way of regulation. First, the government need to set low catch limits and improve monitoring what is caught. The government should also certify those fisheries that are sustainable. Second, the government should establish marine protected areas, such as coral reefs, to limit people from fishing there. Third, supermarkets should label the sustained harvested fish. The consumer should know where his/her fish came from. Whole foods is one of these markets that provide the consumer information regarding meat, and fish products. Fourth, fishers should be required to use nets that allow smaller fish, seabirds, and turtles to escape. Fifth, in order to prevent species invasion, fishers should be required to clean all equipment when changing locations. Lastly, certain locations should be restricted from establishing aquaculture in to prevent the interference of the biodiversity already present in that location (Miller 272). My question is, we know that we have a major problem which is the decline of biodiversity, but why aren’t countries gathering to form a set of world-wide laws and regulations to try to  prevent this decline before it is too late? The current spread of the corona virus demonstrates that nations tend to wait until the problem worsens before taking any dramatic steps. Waiting causes more harm than preventing. This can be seen as the number of deaths rises day to day due to countries waiting until they get hit with the corona virus, instead of preventing it before.

Figure 3. Commercial Fishing Methods: Fishers usually use these common fishing methods in order to catch. Each method has its pros and cons. Deep-sea trawling is one fishing method that detrimentally wipes out coral reefs (Miller 262).

Word Count: 1,217

Works Cited:

Jordan, C. (n.d.). Albatross. Retrieved March 23, 2020, from https://www.albatrossthefilm.com/

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott Spoolman. Living in the Environment. Boston, MA: NationalGeographic Learning/Cengage Learning, 2018.

[rtscrndr53704]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[grgedoors02142]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[stormdoors78476]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[repwinpril9y0a1]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[pat78701]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[porchenclose10019]

'Ocean Smog' Is Taking Over The Seas And You're Probably Eating It, Too

This story is part of a series on ocean plastics.

Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste ― grocery bags, drinking straws, even cigarette butts ― pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics likely will likely stick around for decades, or longer.

Trillions of pieces of refuse get trapped by natural ocean currents, or gyres, at five locations, causing a dance of debris for hundreds of thousands of square miles. While these gyres, geographically removed from civilization, hold much higher concentrations of trash than other regions of the ocean, they’re evidence of a growing problem humans have mostly ignored since we embraced widespread plastic use 50 years ago. But now, researchers are ringing a warning bell: Our reliance on cheap, disposable stuff is smothering the seas, and it’s bound to get worse. 

Marcus Eriksen, a co-founder of the conservation group 5 Gyres, likens this growing horror to smog that covers cities like Los Angeles and Beijing.

It’s an apt description. Over time, a plastic item in the ocean breaks down into many tiny particles, known as microplastics ― so many, in fact, that if you were to stand on the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a gyre and look up, the water overhead wouldn’t look clear, Eriksen said.

“What you’d see are these massive clouds,” Eriksen said. “Clouds of micro- and nano-plastics stuck in the ocean’s gyres.”

Perhaps the smoggiest of these gyres is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, hovering a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. Reports describe it as a floating island of trash twice the size of Texas, so dense you could walk across it, and so vast you can see it from space. But such descriptions are misleading, scientists say.

“The name ‘garbage patch’ is a misnomer,” wrote researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program in 2012. “There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean, and it cannot be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.”

Rather, it’s more like a swarm of microplastic bits.

At last estimate, there were some 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash floating along the surface of the ocean. Waves, salt and UV radiation from the sun will eventually break down these items into microplastic particles, each less than 5 millimeters long. If you tried to account for not just the large pieces of plastic bobbing about, but also the particles, you’d be looking at a number close to 51 trillion, or “500 times more than the stars in our galaxy,” according to the United Nations Environment Program.

By now, plastic bits are so pervasive they’ve spread to some of the furthest reaches of the globe. Just last month, scientists said ocean plastic has started washing up in the Arctic for the first time.

“It’s on every beach, found in sediment worldwide, a small particulate that’s diffuse throughout the water column,” Eriksen said. “It’s a plastic smog throughout the world’s ocean.”

And, like its airborne namesake, this oceanic haze has not been harmless.

Plastic, It’s What’s For Dinner

Recent studies have linked the growing amount ocean plastic to a host of health impacts in marine creatures.

Dramatic photographs taken in 2011 were among the first to show such devastation: rotting albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a remote island in the North Pacific right in the middle of the region affected by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The images showed more than a dozen bird skeletons stuffed with colorful bits of plastic. Their stomachs were so full of the material that scientists said the animals died from malnutrition.

Researchers have since discovered that plastics bobbing in the ocean can pick up scents that marine birds have long associated with food sources. Albatrosses have a sharp sense of smell and will inadvertently gobble up a pen cap that smells like fish, for instance.

These impacts have spread as the trash multiplies. A paper published in 2015 found 186 species of seabirds are now at risk of plastic ingestion. It estimated that by 2050, 99 percent of all seabirds will have eaten plastic at some point in their lives.

Qamar Schuyler, a scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has documented a similar phenomenon in sea turtles. In a blog written for Greenpeace last year, Schuyler said that during her time as a biologist at The University of Queensland, about 30 percent of the turtles she performed necropsies on had plastic in their stomachs.

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=5914b0a2e4b066b42172876e,591af24ae4b05dd15f0b3254,590816f6e4b05c397681f20b,5914d736e4b0fe039b3369ee

Schuyler speculated the turtles were confusing things like plastic grocery bags for jellyfish, a primary food source.

But people aren’t eating plastic particles, right?

Actually, science says yes, we are. A recent study found about one-fourth of seafood sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia had plastic in their guts. While the link between fish entrails and our own stomachs isn’t fully understood (fish guts are usually removed before the fish reaches the dinner table), another study conducted among Europeans who ate large amounts of filter-feeding mussels and oysters found some humans consume up to 11,000 microplastic pieces per year.

It’s unclear what all of this ingested plastic can do to human health. “Our understanding of the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans constitutes a major knowledge gap,” the U.N. Environment Program noted in a 2016 report. 

The Great Ocean Cleanup Fallacy

The vastness of the marine debris problem has prompted dozens of grand repair efforts.

A project called The Ocean Cleanup, founded by an inventor named Boyan Slat when he was 18, aims to create a 62-mile, underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade.

But scientists have cast doubt on such plans, saying efforts to clean up what’s already in the ocean are a distraction from the cause of the problem.

“Unfortunately, cleaning up the garbage patches is pretty complicated,” NOAA wrote in a January blog. “Since the debris making them up is not only constantly mixing and moving, but also extremely small in size, removing this debris is very difficult. 

Eriksen calls such talk the “ocean cleanup fallacy,” and said efforts should actually focus on industries that create all the single-use plastic in the first place, and the consumers who use it.  

Recycling rates in the U.S. have plateaued in recent years, and only about one-third of the country’s waste is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Up to 75 percent of the waste stream could be reused if it were disposed of in the proper channels, the EPA said.

In the meantime, trash keeps accumulating in marine waters.

A recent report estimated that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish. Eriksen noted that scientists now say the Anthropocene ― the next geological epoch that will be defined by humanity’s impact ― will almost certainly be linked to the prevalence of plastic around the planet.

“How do you define the Anthropocene? Some scientists say black carbon from fossil fuels, others radioactive isotopes,” Eriksen said. “Now people agree ― it’s plastic. It’s gone global.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qV3p6c

[vikmali-blog]

The Need for Aquatic Biodiversity

          Coral reefs, and many aquatic ecosystems have been and continue to be destroyed by human activities. Just like terrestrial ecosystems, the acronym HIPPCO (habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation; Invasive species; Population growth and increasing use of resources; Pollution; Climate change; and Overexploitation) demonstrates how humans threaten the aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem services (Miller 255). Aquatic coastal habitats are being destroyed at rates from 2 to 10 times higher than the average rate of tropical rainforests being destroyed. According to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, about half of the world’s coral reef have been destroyed/ degraded. In 20 to 40 years, another 25% to 33% of coral reefs could be destroyed/ degraded (Miller 255).

Figure 1. Coral Reefs: The picture in the left demonstrates how biodiverse coral reefs are. The picture in the right demonstrates a dead coral reef lacking any sort of biodiversity (Miller 256).

         The biggest threat to coral reefs is a process known as coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is when “warmer ocean waters can cause shallow tropical corals to expel their colorful algae and leave behind white coral” (Miller 255). Excessive carbon dioxide is added into the air faster than it can be removed by the carbon cycle to the point where carbon dioxide is taken up into the ocean. The more carbon dioxide taken up, the more acidic the ocean becomes. The dissolved carbon dioxide combines with water to form carbonic acid causing an increase in hydrogen ions and a decrease in pH. More hydrogen ions means that there would be less carbonate ions available for the coral reefs to grow due to the attraction between these two ions to form bicarbonate ions (Miller 257). In other words, increased dissolved carbon dioxide levels in oceans results in warming and the acidification plays a role in “dissolving the calcium carbonate that coral polyps use to build the reefs” (Miller 256). Not only does warmth and acidity affect the chemistry and growth of coral reefs, but these two factors “could also boost populations of some species such as the coral-eating thorn-of-crown starfish that poses a threat to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef” (Miller 260). With all of these human induced changes, there is not enough time for coral reefs to adapt.

Figure 2. Carbonate Availability: As more carbon dioxide is produced, more of it is taken up by the ocean, which results in increase is hydrogen ions. These hydrogen ions eventually reacts with carbonate ions leaving none for coral reefs to use for growth. The left Earth is the optimal amount of carbonate available in the late 1800s and the right Earth is the low amount of carbonate available by 2100 (Miller 257).

         There were five mass extinctions that took place on Earth, and with each mass extinction, coral reefs disappeared and came back after four million to ten million years. If a sixth mass extinction were to occur, many of the coral species that are the centers (or the key-species) of aquatic biodiversity will disappear as well decreasing the overall biodiversity (Miller 256). Regarding marine biodiversity, scientists have observed that “the greatest marine biodiversity occurs around coral reefs, in estuaries, and one the deep-ocean floor” (Miller 255). Coral reefs is just one example demonstrating the need for aquatic biodiversity.

         If we look at the basic facts, we see that Earth is considered to be a “water planet” consisting of 71% of its surface covered with salt-water with an average depth of 2.3 miles. Many of us don’t realize how connected we are to the bodies of water on Earth. It amazed me how  “with every drop of water you drink, with every breath you take, you are connected to the sea, no matter where on Earth you live” (Miller 253). We need to maintain aquatic diversity in order for us to survive. Maintaining aquatic diversity is needed for economic, health related, and ecological reasons. There are roughly 850 million jobs in fishing and ocean tourisms. Forty percent of world population gets fifteen to twenty percent of their protein from seafood. More than half of the oxygen that we are breathing right now is all due to the ocean. By absorbing a quarter of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities, oceans slow the rate of climate change. Moreover, oceans absorb roughly ninety percent of heat added by humans from the atmosphere (Miller 255). Species on land are so dependent on the Earth’s bodies of water and its species. This can be seen with the albatross video.

         Albatross are birds that eat seafood. In this video that we were required to see in class, Chris Jordan demonstrates the problem with albatross. Albatross are dying due to the consumption of small items which include bottle caps, lighters, and even keys. These items were floating among the North Pacific shore. Seeing these birds not being able to fly made me so upset. Because of our littering and because of our lack of care for the ocean, these birds are suffering (Jordan). Albatross is one of many species that are currently suffering because of harmful human activities.

         Through laws and regulation, we can help mitigate the changed in Earth’s bodies of waters to maintain aquatic biodiversity. Initiatives include “using laws and economic incentives to protect species, setting aside marine reserves to protect ecosystems and ecosystem services, and using community-based integrated coastal management” (Miller 267).  Managing fisheries could be one way of regulation. First, the government need to set low catch limits and improve monitoring what is caught. The government should also certify those fisheries that are sustainable. Second, the government should establish marine protected areas, such as coral reefs, to limit people from fishing there. Third, supermarkets should label the sustained harvested fish. The consumer should know where his/her fish came from. Whole foods is one of these markets that provide the consumer information regarding meat, and fish products. Fourth, fishers should be required to use nets that allow smaller fish, seabirds, and turtles to escape. Fifth, in order to prevent species invasion, fishers should be required to clean all equipment when changing locations. Lastly, certain locations should be restricted from establishing aquaculture in to prevent the interference of the biodiversity already present in that location (Miller 272). My question is, we know that we have a major problem which is the decline of biodiversity, but why aren’t countries gathering to form a set of world-wide laws and regulations to try to prevent this decline before it is too late? The current spread of the corona virus demonstrates that nations tend to wait until the problem worsens before taking any dramatic steps. Waiting causes more harm than preventing. This can be seen as the number of deaths rises day to day due to countries waiting until they get hit with the corona virus, instead of preventing it before.

Figure 3. Commercial Fishing Methods: Fishers usually use these common fishing methods in order to catch. Each method has its pros and cons. Deep-sea trawling is one fishing method that detrimentally wipes out coral reefs (Miller 262).

Word Count: 1,173

Works Cited:

Jordan, C. (n.d.). Albatross. Retrieved March 23, 2020, from https://www.albatrossthefilm.com/

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott Spoolman. Living in the Environment. Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning/Cengage Learning, 2018.