The East Pacific Garbage Patch

Worse than A Michigan Landfill

One of the most exquisite sights in nature is a soaring albatross. Wings extended six to twelve feet, gliding effortlessly just over the water. They travel thousands of miles without touching land to rest, gliding silently even while asleep. Seamen once believed the souls of sailors killed at sea lived on in an albatross.

They lay their eggs and dutifully tend them until they hatch. Then they leave for days or weeks to find food for their chick, who survives alone on a rock.

These incredible, legendary birds are rapidly depopulating and it may be too late to do much about it.

Albatross eat fish and squid as they rise near the water's surface. Fishing nets that troll miles wide swaths of the ocean attract, then entangle and drown the birds. Up to 1,000 albatross a day are killed by tuna fishing.

A new threat to these glorious birds has been discovered floating in the Pacific ocean. It's a floating island, an island of plastic trash.

Sounds funny? It's twice as big as Texas.

And since it's made of plastic, it's decomposing very slowly, actually gaining in size as wind and ocean currents add new plastic garbage to the island daily.

The albatross? Well, it evolved believing that anything floating in the ocean was food. Bottlecaps, plastic bags even plastic lighters are eaten from this island, and eventually kills the albatross. 200,000 die from island related food problems a year.

Worse, the albatross parent passes along these plastic artifacts to their hungry chicks, killing them as well.

With the keen insight of the cheap handgun industry, plastic producers point out that plastic doesn't kill animals, people that dispose of the plastic incorrectly kill animals.

It's hard to keep perspective in a world with arbitrary wars, an impending environmental catastrophe and desperate, pathetic attempts for material and philosophical domination by religious zealots of every stripe.

But Samuel Coleridge pointed out the bad fortune that befalls those who would kill an albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We may do well to consider what the loss of this magnificent creature might mean to the earth.

`Is it he ?' quoth one, `Is this the man ?

By him who died on cross,

With his cruel bow he laid full low

The harmless Albatross?