tfan
Joined: 31 May 2010 Posts: 9662
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Posted: 12/23/17 7:39 pm ::: 10 rivers responsible for 90 percent of ocean's plastic |
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https://www.seeker.com/earth/conservation/these-ten-rivers-are-responsible-for-90-percent-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans
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As plastic in the world’s oceans continues to rise, researchers are pinpointing sources of pollution so that conservation efforts can stem the flow. |
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There are extremely small plastic particles found in virtually every sea and river in the world. Plastic particles have even been found in the tap water of more than a dozen countries, including the US. Because plastic essentially never breaks down completely in the ocean, it is extremely harmful to marine ecosystems. It often kills fish, birds, and marine mammals when they mistake it for food.
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jammerbirdi
Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 21046
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Posted: 12/24/17 3:31 pm ::: |
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So, I've re-entered a stage in life wherein I am right about everything. Again. I know. Right? Merry Christmas to YOU guys!
And this story feeds a couple of things only I have been saying, mostly to myself. But y'all should listen, of course, because, as I've made quite clear in the first sentence above...
1st. Plastics in the ocean and NOT global warming (except where they might or will intersect, I guess. not pretending to be scientific) will be the big man-made impacter of life on this planet. Probably going to happen a lot faster than global warming is predicted to in my not-so-scientific opinion, other than, of course, the impact on coastal populations which we may already be experiencing.
2nd. The information in this article shows also something I've really been harping on alone into my bathroom mirror and that is that there isn't a FUCKING thing we can do in western developed countries about any of it. Not to curtail plastics in the ocean or global warming the causes and impacts, etc. Nothing. Nada. We are but one speck of enlightened and yet conflicted people in a poor, desperate, and corrupt, but vast, fucking SEA of humanity world wide that we can not and never will control, growing faster than we can imagine, producing more garbage, plastics, air and water pollution, human waste, animal waste from food production, etc. etc. vomit, die, Earth.
It is a HUGE waste of time, money, and politics, for people in developed western nations to trouble themselves with anything more than preventing the fouling of the air we ourselves breath and the water we need to live. We will do it, 'I' do it, by that I mean recycle, opt for anything and everything I personally can to be more conservational in terms of the environment, but I know, in the long run, it's not going to impact in the slightest the approaching world-wide environmental holocaust. This is going to happen.
Lastly, on a bright note. The earth, in all it's blue and temperate loveliness, will survive just fine. To the planet, it will be as if nothing happened. This entire epoch is, in the time of the earth and universe, but a momentary blip. A subdivision of the life of this planet so small that it's so hard to calculate what the last 100 years and the next 100 amounts to in the timeline of the entire past and projected existence of this rock it would take pilight to fucking figure it all out.
So yeah, we'll foul our air for breathing and water for drinking and poison our food supply even worse than it's already poisoned. Billions will die. Species will disappear. But not everyone and not every species. In the end, the earth will win. It will rain clean and pure water for ten thousand years and all of our environmental sins will settle deep into the deepest vestiges of the bedrock underneath the oceans' floor and this place will be an eden once again and that's just the fucking way it's all going to go down.
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