The Great American Garbage Patch

The Great American Garbage Patch

http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty463.htm

By Frosty Wooldridge

In my 40 years traveling around this planet, I discovered human beings respect nothing anywhere in the world. No matter how beautiful, no matter how pristine the location and no matter what country—human beings toss their trash everywhere. They inject their chemicals into the land, air and water. They throw their rubbish into rivers, lakes and streams.

In my forty years of Scuba diving around the world, I’ve seen our pristine lakes and oceans turn into trash cans for humans. Millions of tires, nets, plastic, glass and metal containers roll around the ocean floor like ‘creatures’ out of place.

As recently exposed on Oprah, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” twice the size of Texas, features three million tons of plastic debris floating around the Pacific. In some places, it reaches 60 feet thick. It kills millions of marine creatures annually. It’s not just the Pacific, 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of all our oceans and seas! That figure is correct!

While riding my bicycle around the world or climbing mountains, I have seen humans toss soiled baby diapers into pristine pools, fjords and rivers. On Mt. Everest, known as the “Earth Mother”, climbers have left tons of trash and garbage on her flanks in their efforts to reach the top. At the base, climbers have turned the area into a sewage pit.

Most large rivers running out of industrial nations feature raw sewage that creates ‘dead zones’ like the 10,000 square mile one at the mouth of the Mississippi River to 27,000 square mile dead zones in the North Sea. How big is that? That’s the size of North Carolina.

Instead of changing their ways, humans continue adding more trash upon the trash with no end in sight.

In a sobering expose’ Mother Jones featured a brilliant piece by world famous author Bill McKibben. He also wrote a ground-breaking book: The End of Nature. I highly recommend reading his books.

“Waste not, want not” by Bill McKibben, Mother Jones/May-June 2009 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/05/waste-not-want-not

“Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town,” McKibben said. “But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks.

“More than that, though, so much of it seems utterly unnecessary. Not just waste, but wasteful. Plastic water bottles, one after another—80 million of them get tossed every day. The ones I'm stomping down are being "recycled," but so what? In a country where almost everyone has access to clean drinking water, they define waste to begin with. In fact, once you start thinking about it, the category of "waste" begins to expand, until it includes an alarming percentage of our economy. Let's do some intellectual sorting:

“There's old-fashioned waste, the dangerous, sooty kind. You're making something useful, but you're not using the latest technology, and so you're spewing: particulates into the air, or maybe sewage into the water. You wish to keep doing it, because it's cheap, and you block any regulation that might interfere with your right to spew. This is the kind of waste that's easy to attack; it's obvious and obnoxious and a lot of it falls under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and so on. There's actually less of this kind of waste than there used to be—that's why we can swim in most of our rivers again.” Or to correct McKibben, at least 53 percent of them!

“There's waste that comes from doing something that manifestly doesn't need doing,” said McKibben. “A hundred million trees are cut every year just to satisfy the junk-mail industry. Or think about what we've done with cars. From 1975 to 1985, fuel efficiency for the average new car improved from 14 to 28 miles per gallon. Then we stopped worrying about oil and put all that engineering talent to work on torque.”

While we Americans run through our busy days, mountains of trash accumulate worldwide by our singular activities.

McKibben said, “Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, "Running the Numbers," uses exquisite images to show the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the 1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the 2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the 60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, or the 170,000 Energizer batteries produced every 15 minutes. The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.”

I have read where Americans use 90 billion plastic and paper bags annually. (Source: Sierra Club) But I’ve also read that the total number of plastic bags for humanity exceeds 386 billion annually. All go to the landfill, or, as you can verify daily—all over the landscape.

“Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream,” We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. And—oh, forget it.”

McKibben covers waste from many corners, but then, he covers the waste of our two wars and military waste.

“Want to talk about government waste?” said McKibben. “We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money—and lives—in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.

“We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.

“But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste—when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger.”

McKibben makes sense! He’s brilliant! So why am I pulling my hair out by the roots? Why do I ride my bicycle along highways with an endless stream of trash? Why do I see fast food, beer and pop bottles littering America’s rivers and lakes? Why do humans create and inject ever more deadly chemicals into the environment annually? How can Americans remain mind-numbingly apathetic to mountains of debris covering North America?

How about the ones of us that care? Let’s create incentive laws to encourage the ones that don’t care—to pick up after themselves. How about a 10 cent national deposit/return law like Michigan’s. I have bicycled the entire ‘mitt’ of Michigan and never picked up one plastic, can or bottle container. Why? Because no matter who tosses their container litter, an armada of kids picks up everything for the financial reward. It’s time for America to take responsibility for cleaning up America. Let’s stop the waste stream by engaging a “National Recycling Policy”.

The original people of this continent, living here thousands of years, maintained a pristine environment. New arrivals from Europe trashed North America inside of 150 years. That’s unreasonable and immoral. It’s unconscionable! Let’s change ourselves toward a more responsible society.

Overwhelming Evidence

Global: Health Outcomes

Whereas: From 1970 to 2004, the proportion of hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa fell slightly from 35% down to 32%. However, since the regional population more than doubled during that time, the number of hungry people has actually increased 43% from about 93 million to 214 million.

Whereas: 380 women become pregnant every minute -- half of them do not plan or wish the pregnancy.

Whereas: Over 100 million women in developing countries would prefer to avoid pregnancy but are not using any form of family planning or birth control. Worldwide, over 350 million couples lack access to a full range of modern family-planning information and services.

Whereas: Over 24 developing nations still have fertility rates, or average number of children per woman, of 6.0 or higher, -- while another 24 have fertility rates of 5.0-5.9

Whereas: Wherever high-quality contraceptive services have been made available with supporting information, the birth rate has fallen, even among low-income populations.

Whereas: Between 2007 and 2025, cereal production must increase from the present 2.2 billion tons to three billion tons, to keep up with population growth.

Whereas: As the result of growing human numbers and over cultivation of ecologically fragile lands, per capita grain yields in Africa have fallen by as much as 30% since 1970.

Whereas: Of the estimated annual 200 million pregnancies on Earth, about 40% or 80 million of them are unwanted or mistimed.

Whereas: In 1984, the year of the infamous famine, the population of Ethiopia was 42 million. Today it has reached 75 million and by 2050 the country is projected to have a population of 145 million.

Whereas: In Nigeria, the growing population will push the cost of vaccines from $20 million annually in 2000 to $70 million in 2015.

Global: Stability

Whereas: In 1900, there were 21 acres of land per person in the world (including tundra, desert, etc.). In the year 2000 there were 5. That amount is shrinking every year as population grows.

Whereas: By the year 2020, the combined populations of Asia and Africa will be 6 to 8 billion people – equal to or greater than the number that now lives on the entire planet.

Whereas: China, its population expanding at about 7 million people per year as of 2006, appears to be advancing economically along the same path as did Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. If it does this to the point of achieving the same level of fish consumption as these nations, the entire sustainable wild fish production of all the world's oceans would be required just to supply China's fish needs.

Whereas: If human population grows as projected over the next fifty years, more food will have to be produced worldwide than has been produced during the past 10,000 years combined.

Whereas: The Middle East, besides having the world's highest rate of unemployment, also has the world's highest rate of population growth, and the largest portion of the world's armed conflicts. Africa, besides having the world's second-highest unemployment rate, also has the world's second-highest rate of population growth and the world's second-largest portion of armed conflicts.

Whereas: In the politically unstable and conflicted countries shown in the table below, not a single country is at replacement level fertility – instead, the region is growing rapidly.

Nation	Total Fertility Rate	Doubling Time
Afghanistan	6.8	26 years
Iraq	5.1	25 years
Saudi Arabia	4.5	27 years
Pakistan	4.8	20 years
Palestine	5.6	19 years

Whereas: The U.S. CIA concluded that a key driving trend for the Middle East in the next 15 years will be population pressure. They point out that, even now, in nearly all Middle Eastern countries, over half of the population is under age 20.

Whereas: The world's fishing fleet doubled in number of large boats and in total capacity during 1970-90. In 1998, this fleet had a fishing capacity twice that of the sustainable yield of the world's wild fisheries

Whereas: Pakistan is short of educational infrastructure and lacks as many as 60,000 middle schools. The average Pakistani boy completes 5 years of schooling, the average girl 2.5 years. Pakistan's female literacy rate is 42%.

Whereas: Violence at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists has its origins in the combination of the world's highest population growth rate and some of the world's most degraded environments. Economies in which per-capita GDP has fallen 60% during the past two decades cannot afford the cost of the infrastructure growth (44% of GDP) needed to accommodate these high population growth rates.

Whereas: Only 33% of developing-world population growth comes from unwanted fertility. About 49% comes from momentum caused by the population age structure, and this requires at least two generations to eliminate. Only about 18% of population growth comes from high desired family size.

Whereas: A thousand billion dollars are spent annually around the world on military spending but only around $60 billion on development and humanitarian aid.

Whereas: High population growth rates result in a dire scarcity of financial capital since any financial capital creation is absorbed in the costs of the infrastructure needed to accommodate population growth. At the same time, large family size in low-income countries causes people to spend most of their income on immediate survival needs of food, housing and clothing, leaving little left over for investment and capital formation. The scarcity of financial capital translates into scarcities of transportation systems, communication systems, electric power systems, human capital, and sound legal systems – all of which are essential for attracting capital from external sources. The lack of capital, external or internal, thus translates into a lack of jobs, which translates into high unemployment rates. The resultant desperate poverty produces desperate struggles for the basic necessities. The result is high levels of armed conflict and decreasing levels of safety for capital investments of all types.

Whereas: The projected four billion people living in cities by 2030 will be more than those who lived on the entire planet in 1975.

Whereas: One-half of the world's population is currently under age 24. To put that in perspective, there are more young people in the world today, than all people living in 1960.

Whereas: Approximately 350,000 humans are born each day and 150,000 die each day, resulting in about 200,000 additional humans on the planet each day.

Whereas: A CIA study covering more than 50 years reported that the primary predictor of a country's instability was its infant mortality rate. Afghanistan's infant mortality rate is 154/1000 births, nearly three times higher than the worldwide rate of 56/1000.

Frosty Vs. Bjorn -- Frosty Wins!

Note: When Frosty Wooldridge sent us this article and his response, we did a fact check on Lomborg's statement that "organic farming leaves a larger footprint than its conventional cousin" -- which struck us as absurd.

Mr. Lomborg's personal assistant wrote us back and said the "source" for this statement was a wikipedia page devoted to ecological footprinting. The sentence Lomborg based his statement on is a hypothetical postulation meant to uliminate possible shortcomings of ecological accounting -- yet Lomborg, aided by whomever is asleep at the Denver Post's editorial desk, turned this into a pronouncement of fact on the ecological footprint of organic farming!

To wit:

The method seems to reward the replacement of original ecosystems with high-productivity agricultural monocultures by assigning a higher biocapacity to such regions. For example, replacing ancient woodlands or tropical forests with monoculture forests or plantations may improve the ecological footprint. Similarly, if organic farming yields were lower than those of conventional methods, this could result in the former being "penalized" with a larger ecological footprint.^[23] Of course, this insight, while valid, stems from the idea of using the footprint as one's only metric. If the use of ecological footprints are complemented with other indicators, such as one for biodiversity, the problem could maybe be solved.

As Frosty points out in his reponse, this ridiculous statement on organic farming pretty much sums up Lomborgs whole article.

LOMBORG’S UTTER BALDERDASH AND LACK OF RESPONSIBITY TOWARD HUMANITY

By Frosty Wooldridge

http://neighbors.denverpost.com/blog.php/2009/04/20/lomborgs-utter-balderdash-and-lack-of-responsibility-toward-humanity/

Re: “Despite predictions of doom, Earth is enough” Bjorn Lomborg, Denver Post, 4/19/09

The highly educated academic from Denmark, Bjorn Lomborg, in an op-ed piece in the Denver Post on Sunday told his audience that human overpopulation wasn’t a problem: “That our profligate consumption requires five planets is a catchy story, but it is wrong. The planet we have is more than enough.”

Professor Lomborg, please tell that to the tens of thousands of species already ensnared by human population hyper-growth that suffered extinction in the last century. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of species facing extinction in this century. Tell that to the 100 million sharks that have been killed annually for the past 20 years that they have enough oceans to survive the onslaught of humanity.

“Upwards of two hundred species, mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth's carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence thanks to technologies that most people, I'm afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.” Daniel Quinn

Quinn refers to the Sixth Extinction Session rampaging across the planet whereby the largest die-off of species continues at the hand, not of nature or natural catastrophes, but by sheer human hyper-population growth.

I invite Lomborg to pull his head out of his academic ivory tower by addressing the harsh realities outside his college window. For him to make such absurd statements in the 21^st century, shows reprehensible misconduct unbecoming a scientist. His counterpart, the late economist Julian Simon, spouted the same crock of delusion that the planet could carry unlimited population.

The artist Shim Shimmel upon completing his work in Antarctica said, “Antarctica has come to symbolize the last of the wild places. But no place is sacred in Man’s eyes. In this pristine wilderness, greed would still find a haven for devastating industry. For God’s sake, with a planet full of beings such as ourselves, even the stars aren’t safe.”

With thinking and actions like Lomborg’s, humanity will not survive with any dignity or sustainable civilizations in the 21^st century. O.E. Wilson said that humanity has become the most dangerous animal on the planet while it threatens all other creatures on the globe.

H.R.H. Ghazi Bin Muhummad said, “Robert Kaplan's seminal article The Coming Anarchy … uses the image of a luxury car driving one way on a highway and a stream of destitute refugees walking the other way to suggest that whilst one part of the world is moving comfortably and prosperously forward, much of the rest of the world is suffering horribly, and disintegrating due to poverty, disease, crime, conflict, tribalism, overpopulation and pollution.”

With an annual worldwide human starvation death rate of 18 million human beings that die from exceeding their carrying capacity, how do people like Lomborg enjoy center stage in the Denver Post? How can such denial and delusion trump reality? Why didn’t the Denver Post allow a more reality based scientist such as Dr. Albert Bartlett, Dr. Diana Hull, Governor Richard D. Lamm, David Paxson, Charles C. Hartman and others a counter article?

If Lomborg’s specious conjecture that we enjoy ‘enough’ planet, how come our reefs worldwide die off at alarming rates? How come we suffer 27,000 square mile ‘dead zones’ at the mouths of our biggest rivers from so many chemicals spewed by humans into their waters? How come our oil reserves, that run our first world civilizations, descend into steeper curves as we pump the planet dry at 85 million barrels daily?

I could add a hundred more examples. It’s horrifically irresponsible to promote relentless human population growth via the Denver Post.

I invite the Denver Post to pull its ink pens out of the delusion of the benefits of population growth and publish top experts on how we might stabilize human population rather than encourage it like Lomborg.

This article illustrates how the patients are running the asylum!

Iain "Earth Man" Murray Day

I looked around the New York Times website this morning, but it was only after searching the site that I found Andy Revkin's quick blog entry. The Washington Post was reporting on Obama's Earth Day trip to some wind turbine manufacturer. The Boston Globe had a few token links.

Overall, however, its safe to say this day is not reminiscent at all of the surging, emotional environmental day of action of early 1970's. Instead of a fire-works rocket, we are left with a pop-gun dud. Instead of aurora borealis, we get a Windows XP screen saver. I was sort of sad about this...

Then I had the great misfortune of coming across an article by Iain Murray, director of projects and analysis and senior fellow in energy, science and technology at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Ian has determined that Earth Day is not pro-Earth but "anti-human". You can read his infinite wisdom here, but I warn you he argues that banning DDT has been a net negative for the environment. So, there you go.

Iain does manage to make one good point in his otherwise soiled ideological gymnastics. He notes that, "when environmentalists talk about man's impact on the Earth... they always portray [it] as harmful."

On balance, this tendency is unfortunately true. That's probably because, on balance, man's impact on the ecological integrity of the Earth over the past 200 years has been catastrophic.

However, let's consider for a moment that humans do have the capacity to regenerate and nourish the Earth. We can plant trees, farm organically, try to help endangered species breed successfully -- you know, that sort of stuff. We did evolve from the Earth's ecological systems, after all. We can have a positive impact if we try. Let's not forget that. We could, if we massed our will power, turn our whole economic system into a Earth-nourishing enterprise whose joint objectives were to heal the planet and create wealth for humanity (which should be indistinguishable anyway).

I guess Iain must, in his own weird way, be trying to help out in such a cause. Its (very) hard to believe after-all, but he too is the culmination of eons of ecological evolution!

Let's all write Iain today and wish him well in his crusade?

imurray@cei.org

Tell him Rachel Carson sent you -- or something to that effect.

Population is part of the problem, but apparently not the solution.

Let's say you had a problem (we're sure you have several handy examples); but this particular problem happened to involve your house-plants growing, out of control, through the roof of your home, thereby causing your house to flood every time it rained -- tough plants, obviously, but that's not the point.

Your Zen-master neighbor teeters by with his cane, and stops. He says, "You must repair your roof and keep your plants cut back." Then he vanishes in thin air. Cool neighbor, but again -- not the point.

The point is, to keep the problem from happening, you need to do a couple of things. Just repairing your roof isn't good enough, because by next week the plants will have busted through it again. Just keep your plants cut back, however, and you still have a hole in your roof.

Isn't it a mystery then -- one that probably not even your Zen-master neighbor could explain -- that when the Asia Society releases a report citing population growth as one major driver of an impending water shortage in Asia... that they don't say a thing about stabilizing the population as part of the solution?!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Asia may see more conflicts over scarce water resources in the coming years as climate change and population growth threaten access to the most basic natural resource, a report warned on Friday.

Water problems in Asia are already severe, with one in five people, or 700 million, not having access to safe drinking water and half the region's population lacking access to basic sanitation, according to the report produced by the Asia Society, a New York-based think tank.

Population growth, rapid urbanization and climate change are expected to worsen the situation, according to the report, "Asia's Next Challenge: Securing the Region's Water Future."

It noted water disputes between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan and the complex relations governing the vast Mekong River, which is shared by China and its southern neighbors, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The report said while water issues have more often generated cooperation than conflict between nations in the past, demographic pressures and water scarcity would be unprecedented in the coming decades.

"The potential for conflicts sparked by the direct and indirect impacts of an increasingly volatile water supply should not be underestimated, particularly in the light of rising concerns about climate change," it said.

"No matter how we approach water resources -- whether it is on the basis of quality and quantity, or as the most potent manifestation of extreme climatic events -- hydropolitics is likely to be a growing force in Asian security," it said.

While Asia is home to more than half the world's population, it has less fresh water per person than any other populated continent, the report said. Asia's population is expected to rise by nearly 500 million within 10 years.

-- By Claudia Parsons