The world's most beautiful garbage dump is spelled A-L-A-S-K-A

[Blue_In_AK]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/08/19/north-great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastic-pollution-spit-out-alaskan-shores

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the remote Aleutian Islands, the string of volcanic islands that hang like a diamond necklace between Alaska and Russia. On one trip, we kayaked for five weeks throughout the frigid waters and even climbed the volcanoes. We saw no one, not a tanker on the horizon, not a plane overhead, not a fishing boat.

The only sign of man was the incredible amount of plastic pollution that had washed off ships and shore. Masses of fat rope and fishing nets, plastic beer cases from Japan, every imaginable size of plastic bottle and multicolored plastic broken into tiny bits—all of it driven high up onto island beaches by savage winter storms.

I still have a memento from that trip hanging in my garage, a wooden sign that says “Watch Your Step,” in Japanese.

I flashed back to those weeks and that pollution while reading the dispatches from another Alaskan coast this summer, by my friend Carl Safina, prolific writer and president of the Blue Ocean Institute. He had joined, as chief scientist, an expedition made up of scientists and artists who purposely went to study and collect beach trash for an upcoming exhibit put together by the Alaska SeaLife Center and the Anchorage Museum. Tomorrow, August 20, National Geographic will air a video detailing Carl’s Gyre Expedition—a trailer for which can be found here.

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[eppur_se_muova]

1. Interested in seeing more about that -- CS's "Voyage of the Turtle" was a good book.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780805083187

(*slightly* inaccurate subtitle ...)

And I see he wrote one the Deepwater Horizon blowout, "Sea on Fire".