Where Our Garbage Ends Up – the (not so) Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Remains of an Albatross chick showing plastic it had likely been fed by its parents. Likely suffocated or starved because it could not expel the plastic.

This is merely one example of the plight of the natural world at the hands of what man has earned. At the cost of fauna and flora, ecosystems, and the health and integrity of the entire planet we’ve chosen the “convenience” of simply tossing out things we no longer need. While the sad reality is that we never needed them in the first place.

We lead such a horrible consumerist lifestyle that we are blinded by how much garbage we are literally feeding the planet whence we become board of our gadgets and our belongings. We end up creating such a horrible mess, leaching toxins, and killing wildlife, while we live our oblivious lives, ignorant of the giant impact we have on the planet. I’m talking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which really is not a great thing at all. It’s horrible.

Simply and quite frighteningly, every little bit of garbage we either intentionally dump in the ocean, or that “un-intentionally” reach there from our littering the lands and waterways get drawn into the North Pacific Gyre. This gyre, like any other, is simply a vortex, a whirl-pool, in the ocean caused by the cyclical ocean currents, wind, and the rotation of the Earth.

North Pacific Gyre - Now a vortex of garbage.

More after the break including a beautiful picture of a Laysan Albatross Chick>>>

The beautiful wildlife, and ecosystems that have to endure our type of behaviour have no way of reminding us about the consequences of our actions. Eventually though, once we have ignored all the signs that we are rapidly killing our planet, and we continued to live our wasteful, greedy, ignorant lifestyles, we will find ourselves without all the beauty around us, without all the resources that benefit us, without all the natural goodness that is the blessing of this Earth, and without a chance for recompense or salvation. For we would have squandered all that is pure, and good, and we would only then awaken from our stupor of ignorance, only far too late.

Laysan Albatross with chick

Here is an amazing resource for making use of things you have around the house that you may no longer need.