Monday, June 30, 2008

Junk adrift

Thanks to the RSS feed from Aquafornia leading me to the LA Times, I finally wound my way to visit Junkcraft. While the site is mildly interesting, mostly from the sense of impending disaster that might confront the operators of Junk as they sail from Long Beach to Hawaii, or wherever the trade winds might blow them.

Take a quick look at the site and then think about this. We all know that there is a big area of the Pacific Ocean that is gathering a floating continent of plastic garbage. You know, all of those plastic duckies that some think it cute to send down our rivers as part of a good cause fund raiser, the plastic buckets left on the beach as families hurry back home, discarded water bottles that find ways down streams until they reach the ocean. At least, we should all know about it because it has been on television news.

It raises this question. Why do we need continued gimics like the voyage of the Junk to make us think, again and again, about what we are doing to this planet? Walt Kelly's Pogo said it best. "We have met the enemy, and they is us."

Remember, in the game of life, Mother Nature bats last.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, we humans change slowly, apparently, and doesn't conventional wisdom say it takes seeing something 15 times for it to sink in (hence, so many mailers at election time). Then you have 20 years of the Denier movement where climate change deniers got equal time in the media, with no evidence, little scientific credentials, when there were a few of them saying crap as opposed to thousands of scientists saying "Houston, we have a problem" with warming.

So not just ignorance or avoidance or unawareness, but a funded movement to push back and convince the public
global warming didn't even exist. That takes a lot of energy and time to counteract it, unfortunately, Wes.

Check out the lastest 2 stories from Amy Goodman. And Happy July 4th to ya!

Groundbreaking Lawsuit Accuses Big Oil of Conspiracy to Deceive Public About Climate Change

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/3/groundbreaking_lawsuit_accuses_big_oil_of

Attorney Stephen Susman helped file a groundbreaking lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of 400 Inupiat villagers in the Alaskan town of Kivalina who are being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by global warming. The suit accuses twenty oil, gas and electric companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and Peabody, of being responsible for emitting millions of tons of greenhouse gases causing the Arctic ice to melt. [includes rush transcript]

"Global Disruption" More Accurately Describes Climate Change, Not "Global Warming" - Leading Scientist John Holdren

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/3/global_disruption_more_accurately_describes_climate

Leading scientist John Holdren says ‘global warming’ is not the correct term to use, he prefers ‘global disruption.’ “Global warming] is misleading, it implies something that is mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet,” says Holdren. “In fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing it’s sort of an index of the state of the climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snowpack, snowmelt, flooding, droughts—temperature is just a bit of it.”

Anonymous said...

Manhattan Beach City Council is the first in South Bay to ban plastic sacks

Despite looming litigation from an industry lobbying group, the Manhattan Beach City Council unanimously banned plastic bags in town, becoming the first South Bay community to pass such a prohibition.

After the ban goes into effect in August, food vendors, pharmacies and city facilities will have six months to phase out point- of-sale plastic bags; other establishments get a year.

full story here: http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_9771614