The Human Garbage Patch – The World’s Oceans
This is absolutely disgusting, but worth knowing:
The situation is far, far worse then the world’s government will admit. When you think about this, how did humanity let this get so bad?
Yes, we need to clean up our coastlines, but that’s not a solution, it’s a Band-Aid. The problem is the plastic industry, packaging, consumerism and commercial fishing (the majority of plastics are related to the fishing industry). There is also no accountability for plastic wastes.
This byproduct of human ‘civilization’ isn’t the least bit civilized, unless we’ve come to accept the notion that civilization means “wastes”. Which we have, and which we have consistently ignored.
This amount of plastic will mean that the chemical composition of the water in the oceans has changed for the worse (never to go away). Yet each year, hundreds of millions of tons more of this waste makes it way into the world’s oceans because humanity can’t stop itself from polluting.
I’ve no doubt that this is one of the reasons for fishery collapse, as poisoned fish find it increasingly impossible to survive in a polluted ocean.
What starts of as plastic waste ends up as microplastic fibres and micro-plastic particles.
Large pieces of plastic fill the guts of marine organisms and cause them to die of starvation, or it literally chokes them to death.
Microplastics are ubiquitous, and are carriers of toxins into the bloodstreams of many organisms, including humans. The long term effects of having microplastics coated in toxins -such as dioxins- floating round in bloodstreams are yet to be discovered. But we can be pretty sure they will be bad, very bad.
George Carlin liked to joke about the human condition and our propensity for damaging ourselves and damaging the Earth. He knew 20 years ago we were ‘fucking the planet’. He jested that after we are gone all that will be left will be plastic, and then -being very anti-religious- went on to conjecture that plastic is the reason for our existence. The Earth wanted plastic but didn’t know how to make it; so the Earth spawned us; we made plastic, and now our job is done the Earth is in the process of getting rid of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w
Joking aside, this is so super-serious the managers of the system have to ignore it, just like they ignore everything else that matters.
Thanks for he avocado link.
My daughter is suffering from chronic myeloid leukemia, as opposed to the acute myeloid leukemia mentioned in the article.
CML is kept under control by a targeting medication, the first of its kind, I believe.
Thee is a genetic vulnerability to certain cancers which my daughter has.
Every day without complications is a bonus.
Incidentally, my bridge partner’s wife has been ill five times in five months because she has a rare condition in which the immune system attacks healthy bodily systems, and that has to be kept under control by a drug that dampens down the immune response, and thereby increases susceptibility to pathogens.
i occasionally think about the hundreds of millions of people kept alive by interventions of various kinds, and the genuinely mentally deficient who need constant care and attention; how will they fare when the ship goes down?
it all worked fine when there were only 7 million homo sapiens and predators kept the numbers down. 7 billion -whoops!
It can be argued that the die was cast when one of our ancient ancestors figured out how to tie a knot.
I’ve always believed that it was when we discovered fire, and then how to make it. Mastery over nature began. This led to everything else, how to use this new power for gain, protection, fear, warmth. The power of fire was the power of the gods, now in the hands of humans.
The most infirm people are at the highest risk (and dependency) in a intricately linked civilization, without which, they would not survive. The very young and the old are also at high risk (no matter what happens). This is why I’ve long argued against those that want it all to collapse, it may be inevitable, but it is certainly not desirable. I say the same against those that want civil war, they have no idea the level of suffering they will trigger against people who have nothing whatsoever to do with their asinine cause.
There is no easy way to say this, but hundreds of millions will swiftly die if these living conditions were to change in any significant way. I think the assumptions that people have about how they will always be ok, always be looked after, always be fed, powered, housed and clothed, is absolutely ridiculous. They are alive now only because of the super-abundance and protection being provided for them, not because of something they have done.
The vast majority of people are not doing anything at all to protect themselves. They carry enormous debts, enslave themselves to the system, work at meaningless ‘jobs’, have no life skills, cannot provide themselves any of their food, medical care or even housing. All these people are at high-risk of dying if anything changes.
We both know catastrophic changes are coming, swiftly. Many of these people know it too, but still refuse to act. These are acts of self-defeating prophetic fulfillment based upon mathematics and science.