What the heck am I talking about?
So here I sit in orlando airport, a location not unfamiliar to me. And I can’t help but notice how damn huge everyone is!
Sooner or later we are going to have to upsize our chairs; our car interiors; escalators and doorways.
I’m not kidding: Even in Orlando, only a few years ago people were like 60% as big as they are now . I’ve maintained for a while that it has to be due to growth hormones used in farming that eventually become ubiquitous in the food chain - a theory that, while logical to me, may be completely unrealistic.
But imagine a scenario: A large stretch of the central Pacific ocean where, historically, air currents have spun in a consistent gentle spiral, to the point wher the sea currents end up in a gentle funnel, with a low point at the center.
Now imagine that area being not simply a large, low pressure eddy - but the largest section of ocean on the planet - over 10 million square miles (or about the size of Africa). And that over time it slowly accumulates any debris floating of that half of the world, even junk which has drifted for ten or twelve years.
There is nothing imaginary (or, for that matter, new) about this region - An area scientists call the north Pacific central or sub-tropical gyre. Sailing vessels throughout time have avoided it for the lack of wind and a very real possibility of becoming stuck, and fishing vessels know to avoid it as a lack of nutrients make it a dead zone.
What is new is how we have affected it unintentionally with our culture of consumption.
Traditionally, debris finding its way to the sub-tropical gyre (whether natural or man made) slowly decomposed into carbon dioxide and water. But plastic does not disintegrate - it basically lasts forever. What happens, instead, is that it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of, ummm…plastic! It ends up in molecule form (yet still not bio-degradable), becoming part of the liquid, and yet - as plastic - still undigestible for any lifeform.
Now the problem becomes apparent. We produce 60 billion tons of plastic a year, and every piece of plastic that has entered the pacific ocean for the last 50 years has accumulated there. One Oceanographic expert has named this region The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - not an exaggeration for an area where the soupy toxic froth extends ninety feet down and contains an average documented six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton.
But this is not the only plastic cesspool on the planet - simply the biggest - and similar vortexes exist in at least four other oceans, covering about 40 percent of the seas.
Beaches have been covered in green plastic sand, and Sea Turtles, Seals, Fish and Bird life are dying in numbers from entanglement or, simply indigestion from plastic…One dissected animal contained 1,603 pieces of plastic!
Yet consumption and entanglement, as visible as they are, are the least problematic results.
This liquid plastic becomes a magnet for the worst poisons produced by man, or at least the non water-soluble ones, including DDT, PCBs, nonylphenols. Small plastic pellets have been found to accumulate up to one million times the level of such poisons that are floating in the water itself.
All animals use hormones to regulate brain activity, growth and reproduction. The receptors for these hormones cannot distinguish these toxins from the hormones (mainly estrogen) they rely on, and the resulting hormone disruption affects sperm count and reproductive ability and has been linked to cancer and obesity. Pretty much…well…the beginning of the end.
To learn more, take a look at this important article, in which experts point out:
“A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.”
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,”
“These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.”
It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.”
“In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.”
“Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect.”
