Sometimes, the things you know are the things you know.  And other times things are thoughts about new things that are hard to wrap your head around.  Like say, the idea of infinity.

I can get close to the idea when I find myself in a desert on a moonless night looking up, or on the tip of a shoreline looking out.

Of course, just because you can’t see it does not mean that  something doesn’t exist.  Like universes, black holes, and islands beyond the horizon.

I’ve been thinking and researching islands recently.  Newly created islands, not officially on any map.

I am also all about trash talking.

It was in 1995 that a man named Charles Moore sailed to sea.  Veering a bit off course, he came to a place in the vast Pacific (between Los Angeles and Hawaii) where the winds barely blew; even the water itself water itself strangely still. Sailboats rarely frequented this part of the ocean, and it was void of the infrequent fishing boat.

The “it” was an island of floating trash.  Plastic to be exact.  The particular floating island that Moore was passing through is know as the North Pacific Gyre a.k.a. the Great Pacific Garbage patch.

A gyre (there are 5 of them on this planet) is a swirling vortex of ocean currents.  Think of the circular flow of water in a toilet – like that.

A gyre is influenced by the earth’s rotation and air currents.  It draws waste material in, accumulating vast quantities of plastic and other debris. The subtropical gyres are part of the deep ocean realm whose ability to recycle, reuse and degrade has seemed limitless. However with our addiction to plastic that has all changed.

 It took Moore a week to cross the subtropical high “no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere” according to his article in the Natural History Journal.  The article is entitled “Trashed.” 

Subsequently Moore in 1995 sold his business and set up the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.  Moore it would seem, having seen the mayhem up close and personal decided to act.  He is not your typical researcher – but more of an activist who has connected with eco-biologists all over the world reporting his findings.

The North Pacific Gyre has been reported to be as large as the state of Texas.  Have you ever driven across the state of Texas? I have.  Not all 262,015 square miles of it – although it seemed like it at the time. 

In some readings I have done the gyre is reported to be twice that size.  I guess the truth of it is nobody has quite gotten the scope of it because it is always growing.

Moore did a calculation estimating the debris at half a pound for every hundred square meters of sea surface and multiplied it by his thousand-mile course through the gyre and found the weight of the debris to be at least 3 million tons.  Moore however was calculating surface area the plastic island is prevalent down to 100 feet.  Try doing the math on that.  The scale of these floating islands is astounding.  Imagine, 40% of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, which equates to one fourth of the planet’s surface.  One fourth of the earth’s surface.

This is just not right.

We do not see these new “continents” as we stand at the shore looking out at the blue Pacific, but they are there.  Insidious masses of accumulated plastic debris.

So how did this happen in such a relatively short time? Semi synthetic plastics were invented as “early” as 1839 with high-density plastics, styrofoam, and cellophane, etc. making their début on the scene in the 50’s.   All of which going into products that we as consumers use daily at an alarmingly accelerating rate. 

 As far as polluting the planet goes, 20% of the debris in the ocean is the result of ocean vessels illegally dumping, the other 80% is washed out from land during storms, or entering the system from the shores of lakes, streams and rivers that eventually drift out to the sea.

Trash has always been discarded into the oceans.

Occasionally booty from cargo ships enters the gyre.

The most famous perhaps being from the loss of 80,000 pairs of Nike sneakers from the ship Hansa Carrier in 1990.  The “Exxon Valdez of plastic-bag spills” (* Charles Moore, 2002) was a previously unreported 10 mile wide flotilla of disposable plastic bags from Taco bell. Similar cargo spills have involved 29,000-30,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frog bathtub toys in 1992 and hockey equipment in 1994 (wikipedia). 

Early homo sapiens must have been captivated at the vastness of the ocean.  The seeming invincibility and strength of its mass.  That same kind of thinking still abounds.  If you can’t see it, touch it, or feel it you are left with just the idea of it.  When it ends up on our plates, literally, winding its way up through the food chain it will be hard to digest.  And too late.

*Unless we as a species evolve at an unprecedented rate so that we can nourish our bodies with plastic we’re in deep shit. (*Quote, me, unquote.)

That horrifying thought needs a bit more of an explanation.  According to Hideshige Takada, his colleagues, and many more geochemists in the world floating plastic accumulates non-water-soluble-toxic chemicals.  In other words, floating plastic serves as a sponge soaking up DDT,PCB’s, and other oily pollutants and concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentration in the water as free floating pollutants. Wow!

Plastics are not biodegradable.  That is to say that unlike natural objects, such as leaves, corn, and human beings for that matter they do not degrade into the soil or atmosphere in a friendly way adding to a healthy ecosystem.

Plastics “photodegrade” a process by which sunlight over a period of years breaks them down into progressively smaller and smaller pieces all of which remain for an unpredicted amount of time (way beyond centuries) as plastic polymers. These now smaller polymer pieces with high concentrations of deadly toxins clinging to them have a name.  They are known to researchers as “nurdles.

The plot thickens.  “Nurdles” are entering the food web right near it’s bottom where it can change entire ecosystems.  That’s right – ours.

 So here’s some food for thought: in a 2001 Marine Pollution Bulletin published by Moore’s Foundation it was reported that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring *zooplankton. Zoo- plankton derived from the Greek meaning “animal drifter”.

Zooplankton is a large category spanning organism sizes that include small protozoan (one-celled microbes that show characteristics associated with animals. Protozoa are an important food source for micro invertebrates, they also control bacteria.  (*  Sourced from Wikipedia.) Equally important zooplankton also include jellyfish, Portuguese Man o’ War, krill, and juvenile fish.  Now throw metazoans (crustaceans, mollusks, and sponges) into the soup, and you have porridge of what are also known “filter feeders”.

Zooplankton play an important role in the scheme of things.  They are at the source of a food web that ends eventually on our plates.

Moore and others have found these transparent filter feeding organisms with plastic colored plastic fragments in their bellies.  They provide no nutrients to the zooplankton and thus can result in death from undernourishment.

Think from small to large, and you will know why all of this information has got me feeling as tiny as a zooplankton in the scheme of things.  And thinking, A LOT.  I’ve decided to start talking trash.  I will talk trash to acquaintances and friends.  Recycle, reduce and reuse.

Slade Graves is a student of the Ecosa Institute in Prescott Arizona.  Ecosa is a non-profit environmental design and architectural school.

The school is accredited by AIA and offers summer workshops as well as semester studies.  For more: info@ecosainstitute.org