One of the world's remotest islands is being swamped with plastic trash ...

[eppur_se_muova]

Diary from the middle of nowhere

Our environment correspondent David Shukman is on the remote Pacific island of Midway to report on the threat of plastic rubbish drifting in the ocean.

Plastic debris collects around the island, scene of a seminal World War II battle, with serious consequences for its wildlife. David will be reporting on the issue this week for the BBC website, radio and TV.

We talk about "throwing away" but in reality "away" can mean a place like Midway.

And the cost is grisly. The island is littered with the bodies of albatrosses that haven't made it. Their stomachs are brimming with plastic.

Brightly coloured, and similarly shaped to the birds' much-loved diet of squid, the tiny plastic items we use every day often prove lethal.

Disposable cigarette lighters are a favourite. Without even trying too hard, we collected 62 in a short stroll along the shore littered with dead birds.



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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7312777.stm

[Kolesar]

1. On public TV yesterday, the Newshour showed how plastic bags are a problem in India

As they develop a wealthy middle class, they are getting overwhelmed with garbage. A new, disposable society.

[diane in sf]

2. Everyone in India dumps plastic bags everywhere--it was one of the most disgusting sights there

besides all the beggars and total lack of any decent sewage handling.

[NNadir]

6. I've seen that, but my take on it is a little different.

What is more disgusting, in my opinion, is Westerners who see shit like that and then go around touting dumb ass energy "solutions" that triple the cost of energy.

India, for the record, is a "renewable energy" paradise. Millions of people have died there in the last decade from burning biomass, for instance.

Of course, the solar cells that fundies tout around here often are structurally build from urethanes.

Basically, there are zero fundie anti-nukes who know any chemistry, but the chemistry of urethanes is isocyanate chemistry.

There are zero fundie anti-nukes who give a rat's ass about Bhopal, by the way, just like there are zero fundie anti-nukes who give a rat's ass how many people die each year in India from coal mining, coal pollution, or other coal wastes.

I was on the grounds of a plant in Hydrabad when wind shifted and we all sucked the coal smoke into our lungs, all of us turning blue with the choking soot.

The smokestack was less than 10 meters tall.

I am always astounded that Westerners are so fucking blind to poverty, and merely - and how contemptible is this? - find the impoverished to be "disgusting."

Frankly, when I was in India what I found to be disgusting was western contempt. It is un-fucking-believable.

I hope you didn't get dirty when you were in India.

[malakai2]

7. I have a different take too

Do as we say, not as we do, we'll preserve nature over there, at the expense of you. That western contempt thing. Americans bitch about the loss of forest in Indonesia (to, in some cases, poor people with no other way to earn a living), or aquatic diversity upstream of the Three Gorges Dam (to further the desire of tens of millions in China to be more like us), but mention clearcutting of longleaf pine forests in Georgia or dam construction in the Tennessee River watershed and first come blank stares, followed by mumblings about progress and economics.

[hogwyld]

8. Well, those damn poor people

cutting down their forest for survival are being short sighted...:sarcasm:

[losthills]

9. How are they going to survive when the trees

(and all the wildlife they support) are all gone?

[malakai2]

12. You think a good portion of them don't consider that?

Awareness that there is a problem doesn't automatically grant people the power to fix it. Especially when they: lack alternative means of locating such luxuries as money for food, water, and shelter; lack a quality enforcement mechanism to prevent the guy three villages over from cutting down the local trees; lack bargaining power with sawmills and timber companies in manufacturing nations, the ones that consume those resources to package and ship to end consumers in America and Europe. It's a little hard to lecture an impoverished logger about the poor choice he's making when it's really his only option-especially when your own house is furnished with goods supplied in part by people just like him.

[diane in sf]

10. It would be great if there was some payoff for harvesting those bags, up

in Punjab they were paying people to clean them up, but it's a pretty hopeless task. In the local customs there no one gives a rats ass about anything beyond their own front door. This was ok when they were tossing banana leaves and naturally degradable wrappings.

[jpak]

13. Yeah - nothing "bad" ever happens at India's uranium mines...

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Country/india09.htm

http://www.wise-uranium.org/umopjdg.html

http://www.anawa.org.au/india/download.html

[NNadir]

16. All the self referential junk from the anti-nuke cult's circle jerk will not make.

nuclear power be vastly superior to the default.

The default, which is seldom discussed by fundie anti-nukes, is to do nothing, which is what the "solar will save us" and "wind will save us" cults endorse in a defacto sense.

The highly paid off anti-nuke industry is spectacular for its selective attention and, in this case, inattention.

India has no intention of relying on uranium.

India has the world's largest reserves of thorium, which is in many ways, a vastly safer element to handle than uranium and, of course, uranium, with its enormous energy density, is much safer to handle than carbon. On the other hand, one cannot get much safer than uranium mines. They don't have to be perfect to be safer than everything else, they merely need to be safer than everything else. Even though the anti-nuke cult couldn't care less about anyone who dies from the default position, I note with my usual contempt that there is NOT ONE anti-nuke who gives a rat's ass on this site about the coal miners - all who died from the dumb ass immoral anti-nuke default.

It is probably the case that should humanity survive anti-nuke industry induced climate change - a less and less likely bet - uranium, and many other elements, will be obtained from sea water.

[diane in sf]

3. The bad thing about most of this plastic is it's unharvestable, millions of tiny

pieces floating everywhere. Can't scoop it out and use it--it's just there forever.

[kristopher]

4. Give evolution a chance.

The plastics represent a bountiful harvest for the microorganism that can successfully exploit a new ecological niche. Forever has such a permanent sound to it...

[diane in sf]

11. Paul Stamets has used mushrooms to convert hydrocarbons into carbohydrates,

but I feel very sorry for the birds, fish and all the rest of the food chain including humans that end up eating that plastic crap before the bacteria evolve to deal with it.

[eppur_se_muova]

17. OMG! There's that name again -- Paul Stamets wrote two really great books

on mushroom farming. I've never farmed anything, but for some reason I love those books and find the whole idea of converting "bioscrap" into edible mushrooms fascinating.

I wonder if mushrooms could grow on treated coal? Might be the best damned thing we could use it for.

[losthills]

5. This is a tragedy of epic proportions.

[formercia]

14. Meanwhile, they continue having large families

in order to ensure old-age survival. The fundie bush-bots speak to them of abstaining when sex is the only feel-good thing in their lives and family planning is the antithesis to old age security.

[progressoid]

15. One-third of all albatross chicks die...from being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.

About one-third of all albatross chicks die on Midway, many as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.

I watched as the deputy manager of the wildlife refuge here, Matt Brown, opened the corpse of one albatross and found inside it the handle of a toothbrush, a bottle top and a piece of fishing net.

He explained how some chicks never develop the strength to fly off the islands to search for food because their stomachs are filled with plastic.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7314240.stm