Plastic litter, a prescient story.
Anthropocene is the science & art of life on Planet Earth
At some point in life, you might discover yourself having walked far enough outside the map that plots the discourse of the common life that society
expects all to follow beyond their birth, and at this point of discovery, this is where you might realize that you can cut out all the distractions
of the buzzy bees, and the perceived connotations of what people stubbornly claims to be "just how it is", all while they seemingly refuse to
see how things actually are.
And once you do, the void of white noise and people without words of meaning to express, all the colors and moving shapes from all the non-essential patches that weaves together to raise a banner of hollowness will start to dissipate.
Slowly disintegrating from that inner stage where they all battled for your time and attention until you have found yourself with enough focus and vivid clarity to notice that the smallest strand of grass and all the atoms that you never managed to see before, all of a sudden are clearly visible, forming a world encompassing strand of grass that transforms into a towering tree of life.
Stretching around the world as it ties it all together.
2050AD
[ Oceans run the risk of having more total weight of plastic than fish.]
And in that moment, if you look just to the right of you, beyond the soil you have dug your feet into, and instead allow your gaze to see the slowly moving surface of this world's wet water, you will clearly start to see the plastic litter that now lives inside the fish that keep swimming in a blue-tinted room with walls that slowly seem to be closing in.
Depleted oxygen keeps being replaced with pieces of plastic litter, plankton that give sway to even more man-made garbage, changing levels of salt, currents of warmth and cold changing place and relevance.
And further out, in an old boat, an old fisherman sits beneath the burning sun.
He is talking about the warming weather, the relentless heat and torching light.
"this is not how my summers used to be," the man tells his phone, or perhaps, more plausibly, he is talking to a living breathing, human being on the other side of that sheet of glass and metal.
Seemingly oblivious as the conversation drags on, he drops a bit more plastic into the sea.
And beneath the boat, just below the surface, a nearby fish slurps it all up, every piece of litter that bounces into its watery realm.
The fish does not particularly like this food, but it is hungry and the ocean is so warm and unpleasant these days, it is hard to breathe, and all the new baby fish the last couple of years seem to be so strange and weak, and ever fewer of them seem to be born each year.
And this strange food that makes it quite ill and tastes so dull and tepid is everywhere, so it better try and eat it because nothing else seems to be around.
After all, bad food has to be better than starving to death.
And as this scene plays out in all its sad glory, behind the old man, a couple in the prime of their life, the wonderful 40´s, fit and toned, and sexy naked, seem quite busy on their laid out towels, not with fishing but with the joy and pleasure of something quite NSFW.
Unaware of the man, or the wind, they keep on grunting, in sweaty moans and pleasures, as the wind rips a plastic bag away from their strawberry picnic, and as they climax, the bag lands afloat out in the water.
Later that day, once they have finished their NSFW fun, they seemingly forget to pick up the bottled water they brought with them.
Leaving a can of plastic to dissolve and breakdown in the sand and rising tides for the next 500 years.
A few weeks later, the old man finally catches that same fish, not with his net, or his rod. No, this strange fish just jumped into the boat, and silently quacked with its swinging tail and open mouth as it seemed to say, "please end my suffering, I can not stand this toxic water for much longer". "I am starving and I am ill, please kill me".
Later that night, the old man grilled his newfound catch, carving the tasty scent with his mind as he grabbed his fork and knife, and carved into the fish, he finally noticed after a bite or two, that its emancipated insides were in fact filled with nothing but plastic litter.
The real situation behind our short whimsical story, Seafood and our plastic litter
Did you know that scientists at Ghent University in Belgium quite recently calculated that people who eat seafood, such as bivalves, these days ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year just from bivalves alone.
Other commercial seafood in Europe and all other places in the world which have been found to contain an increasing amount of microscopic plastic is commercially caught and sold fish such as cod, haddock, and mackerel. While other studies indicate that man-made litter is already present in as much as 35% of all seafood that is on sale at fish markets around the world.
It is also a frequently increasing occurrence to notice plastic bags and other human-made litter inside stranded whales, seabirds, seals, turtles and sharks.
At times, the plastic litter found inside these sea-dwelling animals are so widespread that they literary starve to death, unable to digest and get rid of
the plastic that is trapped inside their bodies. On top of this, as many as 140 000 whales end up entangled in plastic litter every single year. And if we instead of whales take look at the situation for marine living birds, marine biologist Jan van Franeker of Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands reveals that in one of the albatross species he studies, roughly 90 percent of all the albatross birds have some form of plastic litter in their digestive system.
And one low key aspect of our daily human life that contributes in a significant way to the
increasing amount of plastic in our oceans and seafood is all the people that continue to buy bottled water ( and use plastic bags in grocery stores ) and all the other disposable plastic products and wrappings we make use of in our daily life´s production and consumption.
A few numbers in regards to that bottled water.
One million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number continues to increase despite bottled water providing zero benefits over properly produced tap water.
And if you are looking for a concrete global number, in total that means that 480 billion plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 around the world.
And sadly, less than 10% of those 480 billion bottles ever end up properly recycled, the rest get willfully tossed around, burnt or discarded in
a wide range of inappropriate ways, contributing to the increasing amount of harmful litter, pollution and toxins in our food and world, on land and
in our oceans and lakes.
Other severe issues are countries that lack proper waste management, such as Indonesia, the world's second-largest marine pollutant, which despite being so heavily dependent on healthy fish food and clean oceans and nature continues to increase the amount of plastic litter they show straight into the oceans.
More or less poisoning the well the entire nation depends on.
Globally speaking, humanity has of now produced 8.3bn ton of plastic since the 1950 when we first started mass-producing plastic products. A number which equals one billion elephants ( if Earth actually had one billion elephants that is ). And even worse, the total amount of produced plastic is sadly expected to rise to roughly 35bn ton by 2050. And as you read that number out loud, keep in mind that almost all of the plastic we use and produce in the end, end up being tossed into the ocean or discarded in unsustainable landfills.
A sad reality, which, as our marine life and seafood now directly shows us, do not float around as serene garbage without real-life consequences,
the human-made pollution and mountains of garbage is not just hanging out in a serene tropical island where no person or animal will ever get
affected by it. Instead, in the end, our man-made pollution always end up in the things we eat and breathe. Our man-made litter and toxins
hide in the water we swim in, the pleasant warmth we shower in and it lives in the things we drink.
And that is why the world we live in, is the science and art of you and me. Life in the Anthropocene will always be what we have mutually made it,
day by day. Displayed perhaps better than most things by the recently discovered and previously pristine and uninhabited island in the south Pacific with roughly 18 tons of plastic garbage littering its beaches and polluting the local wildlife and waters. Despite not a single human being ever
having lived there.
Go figure people, because that´s all on you.
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Related article, man made air pollution.
Air pollution article and human health, published by Me
Related article, Bivales study.
Science study, plastic litter in bivalves
Related article, The Environmental right.
The environmental right, article by me
Related article, Indonesia and marine pollution.
External article: Indonesia, plastic marine litter
Related article, study, debris in seafood.
Study: debris in seafood
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