ENG 102-1105 ESSAY -- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch--THE OCEAN CLEANUP PROJECT 24 August 2018
ENG 102-1105
Prof M Judd
University of Nevada, Reno
Spring 2018 24A18
James Langelle
Open Letter to Environmentalists Worldwide,
Noah probably didn’t pay much attention to all the debris from the land that rushed into
the sea when it rained forty days and nights during the Great Flood. But in those days, everything was of Biblical proportion. There was also no mention in the Old Testament as to who was going to clean it all up when the waters receded; that chapter forgotten, left out, assigned to a lesser uncredited scribe. The Achaeans having sacked, pillaged, looted and burned Troy to the ground, didn’t pay much attention to the mess they left behind in the harbor as they sailed away victorious with the spoils of war. Homer fails to mention the condition of the Mediterranean, concerned more with what Odysseus would encounter next in his twenty year journey to return to Ithaca. When the Brits retreated from Dunkirk, they left behind a monumental heap of garbage; when the Allies hit Normandy on D-Day, the last thing on Ike’s mind was policing the beach, some enlisted personnel out there on trash detail. Those responsible were hidden in the holds of the ark, the galleons and the landing craft.
Now its modern times, the 21st Century. Out on the oceans huge whirlpools, known as “gyres” that control the flow of water between the continents, have collected all the debris from centuries past. There are old fishing nets that have been lost in storms or cast overboard intentionally, buoys that have broken loose and reduced to pebbles. There is garbage, dumped indiscriminately by coastline developing nations as mountains of it in the poor districts of the cities collapse in monsoon avalanches, killing the poor who live by them in crudslides. There is plastic, reduced by saltwater into billions and billions of particles, floating like a primordial soup in the gyres, from the surface down to several fathoms. It can’t be spotted on Google Earth because of the miniscule sizes of the particles, which makes it metaphorically akin to sweeping it under the carpet; an invisible floating continent.
In the past, the task of addressing an environmental quagmire was relegated to activist organizations such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and others acting independently. For the United States government, the job fell under the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Throughout the years, environmental disasters have taken on many forms such as the Bhopal gas leak ( India, 1963); the 3 Mile Island nuclear accident (Pennsylvania, 1979) that released radioactive gas and iodine into the environment; the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe (Ukraine, 1986); and the Exxon-Valdez oil spill (Alaska, 1989). Nature itself has created phenomenal environmental disasters such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens (Washington state, 1980). In every case the cleanup, although monumental, was nevertheless achieved to whatever degree possible. In the case of the current ocean garbage-plastic pollution crisis, there has been no real effort to tackle the impossible.
Digressing for one minute, it is noteworthy that Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has introduced legislation even as this essay is being written to ban point-of-sale single-use plastic bags from the state. To quote the governor,
"The blight of plastic bags takes a devastating toll on our streets, our water and our natural resources, and we need to take action to protect our environment."
The governor went on to add,
"As the old proverb goes: 'We did not inherit the earth, we are merely borrowing it from our children,' and with this action we are helping to leave a stronger, cleaner and greener New York for all."
The governor’s actions are based on the New York State Plastic Bag Task Force’s 88 page report from January of this year. Similar laws already exist in a number of regions and states across the country and it is the emphasis on “point-of-sale,” the source of the problem, that needs to be seriously addressed. In the meantime, there is another effort underway, again even as this essay is being written, to attack the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a frontal assault. This effort is on the West Coast, in the Bay area of California.
Naturally scientists were skeptical of Boyan Slat, a young Dutch college dropout, when he launched a crowdfunding project with the idea of creating a revolutionary system that would scoop up the floating plastic soup and allow sea creatures to swim around and under it. Now, eight years later, having scooped up the finances first in order to develop the process, Mr. Slat is currently assembling the system at the old Oakland Navy Yard where the initial shakedown cruise will tow it out into the gyre allowing it will float freely with hanging anchors. The plastic tubes and net assemblies below them are expected to retrieve debris by the shipload and a given number of the retrieval systems will be deployed as early as July of this year. It is unproven but there is no better place to start.
Statistics are staggering on the size of the invisible continent and Mr. Slat’s company, The Ocean Cleanup, estimates that it will be no sooner than the year 2050 before the denizens of the sea can have unfettered access to their environment again.
Will it be enough? If there were a Malthusian equation applied to the problem, the reason scientists are skeptical is because the cleanup effort is arithmetic while pollution, or ocean dumping of waste materials, is exponential. There would be no need to scoop trash out of the water if the world wasn’t dumping it in, that’s the bottom line. Where can this be brought clearly into focus? Regulation by government agencies, maybe, but that’s not enough. All the EPA type bureaucracies can do is fine those waste management corporations that violate unlawful waste disposal practices. What about the environmental groups, the save-the-Earth crowd? There isn’t enough money to go around although The Ocean Project has at least proven there are concerned financiers out there willing to take a gamble on a worthwhile project, for the sake of the planet.
In conclusion, there is no guarantee that any system will be adequate to achieve the impossible, but that is what makes the challenge so compelling. A popular line in many science fiction movies is that, “failure is not an option.” We might also add Ralph Nader’s famous line that hopefully, our efforts will be, “too big to fail.”
References:
Ecotoxicology of Plastic Marine Debris
Bhopal http://www.bhopal.com/
Three MIle Island
Exxon Valdez https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/significant-incidents/exxon-valdez-oil-spill
Governor Cuomo and plastic legislation
NYS Plastic Bag Task Force (Report as PDF file on this site)
Boyon Slat, The Ocean Cleanup
Ocean Pollution 101:
Note: This is the final draft of the assignment as it has been submitted for review and grade.
James L.
No comments:
Post a Comment