Huge Gyre Of Discarded Plastic In Pacific Killing Sea Birds

Yesterday's thunderstorm over my neighbor's forests.
Elaine Meinel Supkis

Unlike all previous forms of human waste and left overs, plastic is a very dangerous pollutant. It floats and it degrades poorly. Also, sea creatures are wandering further and futher afield as currents change and the oceans heat up. And the ethos of 'careful logging' in rain forests fails utterly because of building roads always leads to elimination of all trees over five years or less.

Birds and fish can't cope with plastic debris.

The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, grisly wreaths of feathers and bone surrounding colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line and small Styrofoam balls. Klavitter has calculated that albatross feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway.

Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their young. Their flight paths from Midway often take them over what is perhaps the world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas.

This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part of a system of currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Located halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an area of slack winds and sluggish currents where flotsam collects from around the Pacific, much like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot tub.

I have free range chickens. Because they leave their coop and fenced-in run nearly every day during summer to roam about, eating bugs, I have to keep the grounds absolutely clear of all shiny, colorful odd objects or plastic thingies because bug eating birds are immensely attracted to these things since nearly all insects are colorful and shiny! A chicken will eat plastic until the crop literally is ready to burst. They then lose weight but it is the lack of water that kills them swiftly.

Thanks to stormdrains, all the odds and ends humans leave laying around in yards and in the trash gets carried off when it rains hard. Storm sewers have big slots so somewhat large objects of the size birds and fishes like to eat, are swept into the sewer and thanks to the natural boyancy of plastic, they go bobbing off on a global journey. This could be solved by putting smaller mesh screens in our sewer systems but we want leaves and other things to be swept away by storms! And it still wouldn't solve the problems because the really bad storms overwhelm all systems and things will still be swept into the oceans.

The alternative is, knowing that a particular gyre is capturing this junk, since we, and I do mean Americans, are a good deal responsible for this junk being there in the first place, the UN should have us dedicate at least a small flotilla of ships paid for by the USA and China and Japan who are manufacturing a lot of this junk and selling it to Americans, to clean it all up. We don't have to wait for Greenpeace to bring it to the world's attention, this is something we could all ask for except the UN isn't listening to anyone anymore thanks to Bolton and the monkey in the White House.

A manatee from Florida is swimming up the Hudson and is already half way to Albany.

By Dan Shapley
Poughkeepsie Journal

A manatee has been seen in the Hudson River near Manhattan.

The gentle behemeth, estimated at 10 feet long and close to 1,000 pounds, is far from home. Most manatees live in Florida and sightings even in Virginia are considered rare.

Watchers tracked this one last month as it swam north — first near Delaware, then Maryland, then New Jersey. Saturday, it was seen at 23rd Street in Manhattan, then later at 125th Street in Harlem.

Now we know it is very warm indeed! The Hudson river is the world's greatest fjord. Shaped by glaciers, the salt waters reach very high up and the river actually rises and falls with the tides and when a hurricane passes the mouth of the river, the tidal effects can reach all the way up to where I live near Albany.

The acidification and heating of the world's oceans is disrupting and destroying the entire web of life there.

The currents are growing swifter around Antarctica and they are sweeping penguins all the way up to the Amazon.

By STAN LEHMAN, Associated Press Writer Wed Aug 2, 6:30 PM ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil - Brazil is staging a military operation involving a Hercules transport plane and Navy ships — all to return four dozen wayward penguins to the icy waters of Antarctica, authorities said Wednesday.

The 50 birds are the survivors among 135 that started appearing in Rio de Janeiro in early June, dragged to warm Brazilian waters by ocean currents, said Giselda Candiotto, president of Rio's Niteroi Zoo Foundation, which is caring for the penguins.

Flying penguins is easier and cheaper than flying whales, obviously. The migration of all sorts of animals is disrupted, too, by global warming. All across the planet, everything is in flux.

And as expected, partial logging doesn't stop stripping down public owned woods.

National Geographic:

The team monitored the region from 1999 to 2004. The results showed that nearly one-third of the areas that were logged selectively were completely deforested for grazing and other uses within four years.

Sixteen percent of selectively logged forests were cleared within just one year.

The scientists say the rain forests are made vulnerable to clear-cutting by the networks of access roads left behind by logging operations.

"When small roads are cut into the forest for logging, others follow and open up the forest even more," Asner said.

Ecologists had huge fights starting with the Reagan attempts at eliminating our national forests. Years ago, experts showed clearly that once a road is built in a forest, the forest is rapidly decimated. A great deal of the Dept. of Interior's budget for forests was devoted to building roads for loggers. When people see the flourishing forests (they are actually quite sick if you see it up close) of the Northeast, they don't realize, these are either owned by NY state or individuals like myself. We do log our forests, it is good for the forests to be logged carefully, we want the trees to grow and flourish! But all forests 'owned' by countries tend to be mistreated. There is too much political corruption, bribes, desire to take something while paying nothing.

New Yorkers are fortunate that one of the earliest naturalists was our own Teddy Roosevelt. The forests here were utterly stripped and the wild woods of the Adirondack Forest were cut down and being rapidly processed at large lumber mills for building houses in the south and the west once standardized lumber was invented around 1860. Before then, houses were all timberframes and used only local wood for it is very difficult to transport and handle, huge beams (I have done this, it is a pain!). With the invention of 'balloon framing', the standard 2x4" and 2x6" modernized home construction and allowed for bigger and lighter buildings that went up faster with fewer workers. Timberframes need a huge work crew to handle the huge beams. Balloon framing, you can do it with just three people, with power tools, one (yes, I have done this alone!). Still, it is easier with three, at least.

So the Victorian loggers went on a wild gold rush here, claiming woods and stripping them bare. The new railroads that were simultaneously being built, carried the processed boards all over America. Once the trains had access to western woods, the great stripping process proceed rapidly there, too. Roosevelt realized this would end badly so he began to sponsor and pass legislation protecting the forests. This was primarily because he was a hunter.

The paradox of forests, as far as I can see with my own eyes, is perhaps private ownership does protect them. England would have had her forests eliminated 500 years ago due to population pressure, for example, except the Kings and Queens of England own vast tracts of forestlands they created after the Norman invasion because they enjoyed hunting.

Many of my fellow forest owning neighbors hunt, too.

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Comments

[Ripley]

Hiya, Lainey!

I've been lurking on some sailing blogs for a while and I've read a few posts about the Eastern Garbage Patch. Most sailors tend to be extremely conscious about the environment and there's a palpable outrage about the stuff that's being pushed into the waters, the last few decades.

I hope that, come November, we can start making some real headway in solving the problems that WE have produced.

Better days...

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I am a lover of the seas. I have traveled all over and believe me, the toilet pollution used to be the big problem, that and tanker bilge and oil spills.

Then plastic took over and it is now literally everywhere. A serious problem.

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