Plastic, The Seas, and Corporate Responsibility

I'm not sure if the irony was intentional or accidental, but there were several stories in the news over the last week or two that underscore how amazing our oceans are, how much there is yet to discover about them, and how much plastic pollution is affecting even the deepest and most remote parts of the sea. The irony comes from the timing of the stories, the Christmas shopping season, a time which if there is such a thing is surely the peak of the plastic season. Think of all the over-packaged, plastic entombed toys, most of which are themselves plastic, the plastic netting which covers our trees when we carry them home, the plastic trash bags in which we will dispose of it all, and the millions of plastic bags with which we will carry home all our purchases.

The recent stories describe the incredible tenacity and ubiquity of life through organisms recently discovered in the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. Fish discovered in these cold dark depths survive pressures great enough to impede the function of muscles and nerves, and to distort and inhibit the function of the very proteins and enzymes that life depends on, but still they survive here, and perhaps hold secrets useful to mankind. They survive these incredibly adverse conditions, but we have forced life in the vast portion of our planet that is the deep sea to face another challenge with not entirely understood consequences, that of a final depository for much of the world's plastic. These recent stories estimate the amount of plastic material floating on our world's oceans to be an unfathomable 270,000 tons, but even more insidious are the large concentrations of microfiber plastic discovered accumulating on the floor of our oceans. As currents, chemistry, and life interact in complex ways in the ocean, it is a given that eventually the toxic soup we create in our seas will come back to us, through the food chain or perhaps in some other way.


I have called on corporations such as WalMart and Target to do more to take a lead in minimizing the use of plastic in their stores, to recycling all plastics they produce / provide, to finding alternatives to the use of plastic bags in their stores, and to encouraging, if not requiring, that vendors whose products they sell do the same in their packaging and products. These corporations, as tremendous contributors to the plastic pollution problem, are also in a position to play a large role in leading us away from this dangerous experiment of discovering the long term effects of ever increasing amounts of plastic in the environment which we are conducting on our planet. As with alternative energy, necessity will create the means, and there is certainly the necessity. Science is increasingly demonstrating the threat to health and environment posed by plastics, and their ubiquity throughout our planet. The writing is on the wall. The citizens of the most populous state in the country, California, have recognized this with their ban on plastic bags, a first shot. Please write or call Walmart Corporation, Target, Best Buy, fast food corporations and any major users of plastic you know of to recognize what is clear and what is right for us and our children and grandchildren, that we must move away from plastics if the inhabitants of this planet are to thrive in the future.

I do not believe that the God whose son's birth we Christians celebrate this time of year would appreciate the damage we are doing to the great gift of this planet we are blessed with, especially if we do nothing to curb it now that the science is clear.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/19/ghostly-new-fish-discovered-at-record-breaking-depths/

 http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/25/372894314/unexpected-life-found-in-the-oceans-deepest-trench

http://www.npr.org/20142/19/371670931/7-miles-beneath-the-sea-s-surface-who-goes-there

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/17/microplastic-deposits-found-deep-in-worlds-oceans-and-seas

http://www.newsweek.com/theres-even-more-plastic-ocean-floor-its-surface-292715

http://www.newsweek.com/there-are-270000-tons-plastic-garbage-floating-atop-worlds-oceans-290886

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141218-deep-ocean-micro-plastic-fibers-trash-discovery/

 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/10/full-scale-plastic-worlds-oceans-revealed-first-time-pollution