How Plastic Destroys Our Seas
Dear friends,
For centuries, humanity has – knowingly or unknowingly – been doing things that damage the environment. For example, with the age of industrialization, toxic waste has been discarded into the oceans putting millions of marine lives at risk.
This article highlights one of the most severe environmental issues we are facing today, which is the overproduction and irresponsible disposal of plastic waste that is putting marine life AND human life in danger. This is not a recent finding but has been known for quite some time. However, as the effects of plastic pollution have yet to impact most people directly, it is easy to overlook this pressing issue.
Do read this shocking article. It is time for us to buck up and take individual responsibility to reduce the usage of plastic, increase recycling and take care of the environment. If not now, when?
Please protect our environment now and never hurt any animals.
Tsem Rinpoche
A Plastic Ocean: The Truth Behind the Crisis Destroying Our Seas
28 November 2016 by Claire Wrathall
The health of the ocean and the life it supports is at risk from the annual avalanche of plastic it receives – one of the biggest threats to the world’s oceans. But now a new documentary film, which reveals the shocking truth behind the crisis, is set to turn the tide – in public attitudes, policy and action. Claire Wrathall reports…
Anyone who has sailed in Australian waters will have seen shearwaters, known locally as muttonbirds, wheeling overhead in the sky. The birds are instantly recognisable by their elongated wings, which can span more than a metre, the better for gliding on thermals as they migrate. Though the flesh-footed shearwater subspecies is known to be in decline, around 17,000 breeding pairs remain among the 130 permanent and migratory bird species that can be spotted on Lord Howe Island, one of Australia’s most beautiful satellites. With its fabled “twin peaks” (the mountains Gower and Lidgberd), marine park and World Heritage Site status, it ought to be idyllic, but as Dr Jennifer Lavers, a research fellow at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart, Tasmania, knows only too well, this is not the case.
Lavers’ particular interest is seabirds – “the sentinels of marine health,” she calls them – and over the past decade she has made a particular study of flesh-footed shearwaters. In arguably the most shocking sequence of a new feature-length documentary, A Plastic Ocean, she is seen opening the tiny stomach of a 90-day-old chick, one of about 10 dead birds she had collected on a single beach that morning, and extracting 276 individual pieces of plastic, some the size of coins. “There is absolutely no doubt that this bird died as a result of plastic,” she says. “It has literally a gut full of it.”
Items found in the stomachs of laysan albatross chicks on Midway Island in the North Pacific
The plastic accounts for 15 per cent of the chick’s body weight. “If we calculate that in human terms,” she explains, “it would be like having six or eight kilos of plastic inside your stomach. Imagine your quality of life. Once ingested, plastic can block or rupture the digestive tract and leak contaminants into the bird’s blood stream, resulting in stomach ulcerations, liver damage, infertility and, in many cases, death.”
Lavers is one of a host of international specialists – from oceanographers and environmentalists to the world champion freediver Tanya Streeter – who appear in the film, which was shot in 20 locations across the globe over four years. The person who set the cameras rolling is producer Jo Ruxton, who conceived the idea as a TV documentary but was pushed – in her words – “to her limits, both personally and financially” to make it happen.
Ruxton spent 14 years in Hong Kong with the World Wide Fund for Nature, where she set up its marine programme. She then joined the BBC’s Natural History Unit, where she produced such seminal series as The Blue Planet. In 2008 she founded her own media company specialising in underwater filming and logistics. Later that year, back in Hong Kong where she was working on a film about shark finning, she heard about what has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant free-floating “island” of discarded plastic 1,500 miles off the coast of San Francisco, an agglomeration formed by the predominant circular wind-driven current, and said to be twice the size of Texas and 10 metres deep. It would make a great subject for a documentary, she thought. “I managed to get myself on to a research vessel that was going out to look at it,” she says.
A loggerhead turtle rescued in Sardinia with plastic in her digestive system
But when they got to where it was supposed to be, there was nothing to see – just clear blue water. As soon as the boat was 400 miles off shore, the six scientists aboard began to test the water to check the levels of plankton. The results were horrifying. “Although you couldn’t see anything above the water – it all looked pristine – the closer we got to the centre of the gyre, the more and more dense [the amount of plastic in the water]. The plankton trawls were absolutely choked with tiny fragments of plastic,” she says.
There are five main circular currents, or “gyres”, in the North and South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, formed by the rotation of the Earth, and they collect anything carried from river mouths and coasts and transport it to their centres. Scientists estimate that it takes about 20 years for plastics leaving land to reach the centres of these gyres. Though plastic is ultimately indestructible, sunlight and salt make it brittle, and wave action causes it to break up into fragments. If it has a density of less than one [gram per cubic centimetre] it will float, and if it’s greater than one it sinks. These tiny pieces of “microplastic” mix with plankton and are ingested by the animals at the heart of the food chain. “I realised then that it was a much more insidious problem than I’d thought,” she says, “that it was not something that could feasibly be collected and disposed of carefully.”
If that were not bad enough, the plastic itself was becoming more toxic the longer it remained in the water. As research by marine biologists at San Diego State University found, plastic floating in the water becomes a magnet for toxic chemicals that have washed out to sea. “It absorbs decades’ worth of industrial and agricultural effluent including compounds that have been banned such as DDT and endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked with cancer, auto-immune diseases, infertility and cognitive developmental problems. These all have a route into the food chain by means of plastic waste, which puts a lot of people at risk,” she says. An estimated billion, in fact, which is the number of people on the planet reckoned to rely on fish as their main source of protein.
A school of jacks in the Pacific Ocean
“We are now producing more than 300 million tonnes of plastic a year,” Ruxton continues, “half of which is for single use.” Much of this will end up in the oceans, which are already believed to contain the eight million tonnes that are dumped annually.
The numbers Ruxton cites are horrifying. The Container Recycling Institute says 100.7 billion plastic drinks bottles were sold in the US in 2014, equating to 315 bottles per person and 14 per cent of all litter. More than half were made to package water, a litre bottle of which will have used six litres of water and a quarter-litre of oil in its manufacture. In short, the world needs a wake-up call.
Ruxton was inspired in part by the success of The End of the Line, Ocean Awards judge Charles Clover’s documentary about the devastation on the oceans wrought by overfishing that gave rise to Blue Marine Foundation, which campaigns for and facilitates the creation of marine reserves. She decided that rather than take the film to a broadcaster, she would self-fund it, so, with Sonjia Norman, a lawyer and the film’s executive producer, she set up the Plastic Oceans Foundation. Its first project was to raise the money to make the film, which is fronted and directed by the Australian-born, Hong Kong-based journalist (and keen surfer) Craig Leeson, with whom Ruxton first worked on a programme about Hong Kong’s population of pink dolphins.
To ensure the film has a legacy, the charity will continue to trumpet its message and campaign for cleaner oceans through education, business (in terms of what can be done to encourage sustainability), science and policy. “We’ve made the film,” she says. “Now the real work begins. I want this to be a game changer.”
The A Plastic Ocean team filming dolphins
Despite the gravity of the film’s message and the horror of some images, it is not without sublime natural beauty. It begins with Leeson searching for the elusive pygmy blue whale – the smallest known subspecies of the world’s largest animal, though they can grow to lengths of about 24 metres – in the Indian Ocean 30 miles south of Sri Lanka. The film features the first underwater footage of the majestic marine mammal. Inevitably there is plastic floating on the surface.
The film is packed with adventure too. Witness the dives, unencumbered by scuba equipment, made by Tanya Streeter. And Professor Cristina Fossi, of the University of Siena, firing harmless darts with a crossbow from the side of a boat as a means she has pioneered of collecting blubber biopsies from dolphins as they frolic above the water. There is even a submarine: a sequence shot off Marseille in the Mediterranean in which the late marine conservationist and underwater cinematographer Mike deGruy descends 420 metres to an “abyssal plain” in a Comex submersible (a Remora 2000 Twin Seat 610M), where he encounters discarded plastic bottles on the silty seabed.
“This isn’t like climate change or ocean acidification where you feel helpless and wonder what you can do,” Ruxton continues. “This is a problem we can solve through a change in behaviour. I want to get to the stage where buying bottled water is as frowned upon as smoking has become.”
Exploring the deep in a submersible off the coast of Marseille
Of course, plastic will always be with us and there are fashion and beauty brands helping save the oceans. The challenge is what we do with it when it’s served its purpose. As Leeson puts it: “I’m not anti plastic, I’m anti plastic in the environment. If we manufacture it and use it we must learn how to deal with it properly before it gets in to the environment and starts to wreak havoc.” In the film, he shows how all packaging in Germany has been recovered since 1991, “eliminating plastic waste from the environment and turning a profit by converting it into pre-plastic pellets that can be turned into new plastic”. Which is not to say that Germany’s Baltic and North Sea beaches, nor indeed its waters, have been returned to a state of grace. There’s too much non-German plastic waste at large for that. But it is a step in the right direction and a model the rest of the world would do well to follow.
If anything acts as a call to action, it is surely the Polynesian nation of Tuvalu that features in the film. “This beautiful pristine tropical island was completely sustainable until 1978 when it became an independent nation and began to import goods, and everything came wrapped in plastic,” explains Ruxton. “There’s nowhere to bury it. [The atoll is made of coral that is too hard to dig into.] So the whole island looks like a landfill site and they burn it, so there’s a sort of thickness to the atmosphere. It’s really not nice. When we were there we were filming a family group of 30 people. Five of them had cancer and two had died in the previous 18 months. As filmmakers we can’t say the two are connected with the fact that the air must be full of dioxins and furans. No one’s done the epidemiological study. But I saw it as a vision of our future. The whole planet could end up looking like Tuvalu.”
A Plastic Ocean will be released on January 12, 2017. For more information, see plasticoceans.org
Pictures courtesy of Jo Ruxton; Michael Pitts; Tim Aylen; Plastic Oceans; Kent Backman; Mandy Barker
Source: http://www.boatinternational.com/luxury-yacht-life/marine-life/a-plastic-ocean-the-truth-behind-the-crisis-destroying-our-seas–32125?utm_content=bufferdae3a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
For more interesting information:
- There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish
- Is it time to worry?
- Keep Up the Good Work! Our Earth is Healing
- Shell Oil Drilling in Arctic Ocean
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As to these days millions of marine lives such as fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals at risk. The main reasons behind this critical situation is tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year. Fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals can become entangled in or ingest plastic debris, causing suffocation, starvation, and drowning. Well….unless something is done , it has been predicted there could be more plastic in the sea than fish in no time. The numerous of plastic scraps dumped into seas , rivers is worrisome. The impacts include fatalities as a result of ingestion, starvation, suffocation, infection, drowning, and entanglement. The best way is to cut the production and stop using plastic bags, food container straws folks and spoon usage. There must be a restrictions on the use of plastics, which we as consumers need to do something about it. Its the most severe environmental issues we are facing today, which is the overproduction and irresponsible disposal of plastic waste. As fish stocks and coral reefs die off, millions of people who depend on the ocean are at risk of losing their only source of income as well. The impacts include fatalities as a result of ingestion, starvation, suffocation, infection, drowning, and entanglement. Hope more and more people gets to the bottom of it working towards a more clean and healthy environment.
Thank you for this sharing.
Forty years later, plastic bags are everywhere, especially places they shouldn’t be. Such bags consistently make the top-ten list of plastic waste items collected during the annual Coastal Cleanup Day led by the non-profit environmental group Ocean Conservancy — meaning the mass production of the plastic bag may end up being one of humanity’s biggest regrets. Along with plastic water bottles, plastic food wrappers, plastic bottle caps, and plastic straws, plastic waste is creating an ocean “wave” that, researchers believe, will result in the mass of ocean plastics becoming greater than the mass of marine life in Earth’s oceans by 2050.
A report by the World Economic Forum in 2016 stated that worldwide plastic use has risen 20-fold in the past 50 years. At this rate, it is predicted to double again in the next 20 years. By 2050, we will use three times as much plastic as we used in 2014. Compounded with the fact that plastic can take up to 1,000 years to decompose in landfills, it is possible the Earth and all of its life, including humans, will be drowning in plastic in the future. As National Geographic once explained: “If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America—and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks—their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later.”
A UN Environment report suggests “agronomists, material scientists, environmental scientists and others” devise “a more realistic and reliable techniques for whole life cycle analysis assessment.” Compostable packaging using waste organic material and fungal mycelium material has shown some potential, too.
Various plastic bans in municipalities have been increasing in popularity. Initial reports suggest positive outcomes. For example, a plastic bag tax in Ireland in 2002 led to a 95 percent reduction in plastic bag litter. Some companies, like TerraCycle, promote “up-cycling,” which is when hard-to-recycle products are reused creatively, say in construction, rather than disposed of in landfills.
Animals show love for humans! Cow, lions, apes, dogs, bears, parrots and more can all be very affectionate and show surprising emotions when it comes to expressing their love for people. An emotional animals hugging humans video.
https://video.tsemtulku.com/videouploads/comment-1546455946.mp4
Evidently, stopping the usage of plastic and recycling the plastic materials effectively after usage can indirectly or directly save millions of living beings who are surviving in the sea and near the sea side. After reading this article, it makes more sense for me to work harder for any recycling activities not only to keep our human living environment clean and beautiful, but most importantly able to prevent the plastic materials flowing out from the land heading towards the sea. These plastic materials can go into the digestion systems of the sea animals that can end up in their death owing to the toxic of the plastic materials and follow by sea animals’ extinction. Other animals such as birds can unknowingly recognize the plastic materials as food too. Hence, for those who are vegetarians and vegans, it is truly recommended to reduce the usage of plastic and start to keep those disposable plastic materials for recycling purpose as part of our compassion to save the innocent animals from further pain and suffering.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article to educate us on how to save the animals as well as preserve the natural environment for our many generations ahead. We should not waste our human rebirth by not doing anything to save other forms of life.
Humbly with folded hands,
kin hoe
H.E. the 25th Tsem Rinpoche loves animals and is passionate against their harm, torture, and abuse.
The few minutes a day we spend on social media creating awareness for animals who cannot speak is purely spiritual and humanistic practice because we are trying to alleviate pain from another sentient beings and that makes us more spiritual, and that makes us more spiritual and more humane.
Plastic has become a part of our lives of convenience and easy to buy. water bottles and bags etc, we use once and throw away do end up in land and ocean.Best way to deal with these problem is to limit or eliminate our use of disposable plastics totally and encourage people to refuse plastics whenever possible. Government have to come out with the pans and Ban plastics and dumping into the ocean. This will get worse very harmful to human and the animals. this is very eye opening article, this what we are contributing the mother earth by destroying it and putting toxic into the ocean….
This is a monumental damage to the marine environment could take many lifetimes to solve. Biodegradable plastics may not be the holy grail we have conveniently hoped it would as, biodegradation of plastics could just be a process of turning plastic into smaller fragments like microplastics. Microplastics which affect the marine life foodchain is the greatest threat ever.
As plastic is not a naturally occurring substance or material and is produced synthetically, not many microbes target and ingest plastic. However as of last year the Japanese found certain microbes that eat plastic bottles.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles.html
By reducing and stopping the use of plastic stops worsening the issue at hand, this is certainly one of the better strategies to not make things worst than it is. Still there are so many more plastic that are still floating around in the ocean polluting marine life.
Certain bioplastics made from corn are certified as marine environmental degradable, however only one company in the world is known to be producing that. This is a step up from using petrochemical plastics.
http://www.algalita.org/bioplastics-are-they-the-solution/
A radical solution I can think of is if we have automated ships in the sea, that runs on solar power that can take in sea water filter it and remove it of plastic content, and this sea water is then discharged back into the sea. The plastic is also filtered out and is turn into fuel that powers the ships. These ships will only take seawater that has a high density of plastic.
1/1/2017 mark a new journey for all Selagor residence, we no longer use plastic bag and polystyrene containers, I hope all other states in Malaysia will follow soon. Plastic and polystyrene containers waste has contributed to one of the major waste in our environment today. Being a residence in Selangor, Im happy to be able to be part of this. Saving our environment is one of the major urgency. Just imagine we live in an environment where plastic bag and polystyrene containers takes hundreds of years to dissolved, very soon our neighbourhood will be buried by all these waste. Marine life will be extinct eating waste plastic bag and polystyrene, turtles and fishes will be chok to death. Im looking forward for more regulation taking care our environment, after all, the one who benefits is still us.
Plastic throw into the ocean will pollute the ocean, endanger the marine lives. In the end it will affect the human as well, because marine life digest plastic and human eat marine life or seaweed that with polluted with plastic and toxic released by plastic. Thus, we should use our own bottle to refill water instead of buying mineral water, use our own lunch box to take away our food and use recycle back instead of using plastic bag to carry things or do our shopping.
Only with each individual do their part to reduce the usage of plastic and protect our environment, we can a cleaner planet to live in, a cleaner ocean and blue sky.
It seems obvious that plastic, a non-biodegradable material has caused havoc to our environment. The most obvious way to decrease the impact of plastic is simply not to use them. If we are conscious enough in our daily lives, there are many aspects we can contribute to reduce the consumption of plastic. It’s not only plastic bags, but also bottled water, plastic straws, plastic food containers, etc. These are the items that we find them so convenient that sometimes it’s hard to resist not using them. Therefore it takes extra steps and effort to make some changes in life, to bring our food container to pack food, to bring our own recycled shopping bags, to bring own water bottle, etc. All these effort seems trivial but mean a lot to create a green environment.
Besides the individual effort, we are glad that Malacca government has put a total ban on plastic bags made from petroleum by-products. We hope that more lawmakers from all over the world can emulate this and let’s all say NO to plastic.
It’s horrible and I’ve seen it myself on the once pristine beaches of Hawaii. It’s a global scale problem just like global warming and countries ought to get together to find a solution.
We are very much dependent environment to get resources, such as water, shelter, food, clothing and many others. Since the environment is important, human beings are advisable to avoid any activities that may cause destruction and to ensure the environment is safe and clean.
Thank you Rinpoche for this sharing.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article with us all. I think that all of us should use recycle bags when we go shopping. We should throw the plastic items properly.If we continue to throw plastic into the sea , marine life could be at risk and end .
This article serves as a great wake up call for everyone of us to not only start preventing ourselves from harming our own self. We are what we created and we reap the harm we created ourselves. What an alarming discovery, fish contain 15% of plastic. Letting us know why we need to start conservation works at a gung-ho rate and do not ignore this anymore.
Very informative blog post that remind us.
As human consume fish ,prawns and so forth from the sea laced with harmful chemical, toxins build up that lead to health problems in long term.Sad to know environment is so bad when some people do not care much about it.Sooner or later our oceans will be filled with rubbish,plastic if we are not doing enough to protect the environment.The plastic accounts for 15 per cent of the chick’s body weight…that is shocking.
I do hope more people are aware of the truth behind the crisis destroying our seas.
Thank you Rinpoche its a good sharing.
There are ways we can reduce the use of plastic, and it can starts with anyone, even you are alone, you are not an activist with a group of people or to have an organised group to reduce the using of plastic and contributing to less plastic end up in the ocean:
* Wean yourself off disposable plastics
-90% of the plastic items in our daily lives are used once and then chucked: grocery bags, plastic wrap, disposable cutlery, straws, coffee-cup lids.
* Stop buying water
-Bring your own thumbler instead buying plastic bottled drinking water.
* Stop using plastic container
-Pack your lunch in reusable containers and bags.
* Bring your own shopping bag
-Instead of getting plastic bag when you do your shopping.
* Reuse & recycle plastic wares
…and here more tips on use less plastic we all can practice daily: https://www.reefrelief.org/2013/01/51-ways-to-reduce-plastic-use-or-completely-eliminate-it/
http://www.greeneducationfoundation.org/nationalgreenweeksub/waste-reduction-tips/tips-to-use-less-plastic.html
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/responsible-living/stories/16-simple-ways-reduce-plastic-waste
Thank you Rinpoche for this article.
This article serves not as an environmental caution to us, but also a wake-up call to us all! If this article isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what else can be.
It is surprising to see so many documentaries and works on preserving the beaches, the sea, the ocean, yet not much efforts had been placed to inform everybody, nor the government took any evasive actions, or preventive actions. Save and except maybe for Germany and Sweden.
I was surprised to learn that there is a floating island of plastic that is twice the size of Texas! I wonder that makes how many Singapore islands already. What is really shocking is, and maybe the rest of us have not realised is the fact that planktons is the sea of life.. the start of the food chain, and ending up with us [if we are not vegetarians yet]. If the planktons are already ingesting plastic.. carrying with them the toxicity of plastics.. when we “enjoy” our dinner from the sea.. are we not ingesting plastic as well? I wonder what it does to our bodies.
On a separate video I watched, it talks about the high pesticide level from Cameron Highlands, Malaysia… 38 times higher than the approved rating by European Food Safety Authority.. so it really makes me wonder the type of poison we are feeding ourselves now.
Thank you, and I hope the documentary of Platsic Ocean goes viral..
This is not just another article about environmental issue but a message to everyone because all of us are responsible whether directly or indirectly in causing this problem. The usage of plastic has become common thing on a daily basis, this is because of the many conveniences & benefits that it brings to our lives. However, the problem lies in the irresponsible disposal of these “thrown away” knowingly or unknowingly. The author has chosen the right platform of education, business sustainability & science to create awareness & encourage recycling when it is no longer useful instead of just discard it like another general waste. Ultimately, I believe it is everyone effort to protect the environment & mindful of our actions to make this planet cleaner, healthier & safer for all living beings.
Use less plastic & start recycling.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article.
As an avid (though former) scuba diver, one of the most upsetting things I saw when underwater was decaying plastic bags draped over bleached white coral and plastic bottles half-buried in the ocean floor. As we went along our dives, my dive buddy and instructor had a bag with him which he would use to store litter that he picked up from the oceans. But he himself admitted that such efforts were futile in the face of human existence. We have become so dependent and thoughtless with our plastic use, that the problem is seemingly never-ending.
So maybe the first thing we need to do is improve awareness of our own consumption. There are many things we can do on a day-to-day basis to help limit our consumption of plastics. Drink from your own refillable water bottle, instead of buying bottled water. Bring your own containers to tah pau food with – everyone, despite their best intentions, know that hawker centres’ plastic containers are only reused once or twice before being discarded, and styrofoam is horrendously toxic. Bring a recyclable bag when you go grocery shopping, instead of using the supermarket’s.
Governments should impose a tax on plastics and direct the revenue that’s generated towards environmental conservation projects. And if people still don’t think that’s right, and don’t want to do it, and they think the whole plastic issue is baloney, please spare a thought for this poor turtle… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wH878t78bw
It is extremely shocking to know that the plastics that we use everyday can end up in the air we breathe and the food we eat.
Most of us think that plastic is some kind of thing that will degrade over time, but the truth is that plastic can remain unchanged for hundreds of years and during that course of time it could end up in several different animals.
So the message is clear, since we never know where our plastic items will end up the safest option is to not use any of them at all. If not we should reuse them or send them to a place where they can be recycled and changed into new items.
I really hope that everyone in the world will take responsibility for their plastic items.
Thanks Rinpoche and the blog team for sharing this shocking truth, I am definitely in the group of human who is contributing to this plastic ocean, I feel very guilty on that.
Nonetheless, the effort of publishing this fact is very good to educate more people to be aware on the plastic usage. The things that we consider “convenient” are killing the earth and all the living beings on it.
I took a look at the documentary trailer, it’s good and can’t wait to watch the completed documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zrn4-FfbXw
I believe the world would become a better place if everyone of us be mindful on every action and usage. May this documentary be a success to wake up human beings who view personal convenience more than the health of the environment, that our actions are affecting everyone including our love ones.
Thank you.
Rinpoche truly moves hearts and changes lives by reliving through insurmountable hurdles and overcoming many of his terrifying experiences, loves, joy and tragedies that Rinpoche has gone through, and reviewed in his “The Promise” book! At many a time, when we feel we must give up or fall down, Rinpoche could be used as “A glimmer and beacon of light and hope” as displayed in the aforesaid wonder-book! What Rinpoche said is so logical and to the point in this blog-article too! Knowingly and unknowingly, things have been done that had damaged the environment, putting millions of marine lives at risks. As George Bernard Shaw has once said, “We are the living graves of murdered beasts and living sea-creatures!” And as backed-up by Albert Schweitzer remark: “Until we stop harming all living beings, we are still savages”. Because as said in this blog-article, “There may soon be more plastic in the oceans than fishes and sea-creatures!”
A high percentage of the world’s population has no idea of recycling or cannot be bothered though many countries are making an effort to reduce the amount of plastic used. Recycling is important but educating the public to be more mindful not to simply throw garbage out their windows is the root of the whole game.
People have a habit if throwing garbage out the windows of cars, boats, houses and apartments. These garbage will come back and haunt us as they get washed ashore onto our front door and beach and end up in the food chain, as scientists are finding out.
So, we do have to be mindful and do our part by consuming less plastics by using recyclable or reusable products. As consumers, we have the say as to whether the producers make more disposable products or recyclable or reusable products.
I was in Bali recently and also heard about the alarming concern of plastic pollution on the island. As this article highlights that plastics don’t really biodegrade. It’s become so critical in Bali that tons of plastic waste are being washed on the shores of Bali daily, causing serious environmental damages. There are 2 sisters, Melati and Isabel Wijsen, below the age of 18 who championed the cause of halting this problem using Mahatma Ghandi’s method of going on a hunger strike in order to get the Governor’s attention and agree to meet them. Their story is here http://storyofstuff.org/blog/people-were-trashing-their-beautiful-island-nation-but-these-young-women-stopped-plastic-pollution-for-good/
Below are some helpful tips to stop using plastic from http://www.ecowatch.com. Every bit of effort counts.
“Ten Ways To “Rise Above Plastic.”
Choose to reuse when it comes to shopping bags and bottled water. Cloth bags and metal or glass reusable bottles are available locally at great prices.
Refuse single-serving packaging, excess packaging, straws and other “disposable” plastics. Carry reusable utensils in your purse, backpack or car to use at bbq’s, potlucks or take-out restaurants.
Reduce everyday plastics such as sandwich bags and juice cartons by replacing them with a reusable lunch bag/box that includes a thermos.
Bring your to-go mug with you to the coffee shop, smoothie shop or restaurants that let you use them, which is a great way to reduce lids, plastic cups and/or plastic-lined cups.
Go digital! No need for plastic cds, dvds and jewel cases when you can buy your music and videos online.
Seek out alternatives to the plastic items that you rely on.
Recycle. If you must use plastic, try to choose #1 (PETE) or #2 (HDPE), which are the most commonly recycled plastics. Avoid plastic bags and polystyrene foam as both typically have very low recycling rates.
Volunteer at a beach cleanup. Surfrider Foundation Chapters often hold cleanups monthly or more frequently.
Support plastic bag bans, polystyrene foam bans and bottle recycling bills.
Spread the word. Talk to your family and friends about why it is important to reduce plastic in our lives and the nasty impacts of plastic pollution.”
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article. It is really saddening to see that animals are dying, again, due to the cause of human mistakes. We live in this planet, we are part of the planet, every human beings should play their role to keep the environment clean and healthy. Every living being is related to each other, as our food chain is inter-related in the ecosystem. Even if one part in the ecosystem destroyed, it will effect the whole food chain, which will indirectly affect human too. Nowadays human ignorant minds are polluted by many other things and entertainment in the society, until they have forgotten that we are actually very dependent species on earth. We depend on the whole environment to live on. Hope everyone of us can play a small role in keeping the environment clean, for example, we can start with recycling. So that unwanted plastics won’t be disposed uncontrollably. _/\_
The majority of us have the “out of sight, out of mind” or “as long as it’s not in my backyard” attitude when it comes to refuse. Well the result is pretty clear as can be seen in this article.
The only way to halt this huge problem is when products such as PET bottles are no longer produced and instead, only quickly biodegradable packaging is produced and utilized. It really has to come from the production end.
However, I’m not sure if technology and adoption of new technology is moving as fast as we pollute though. Meanwhile it continues to be grim.
This is really sickening and heart breaking how we humans instead of protecting others we end up killing them due to our intelligence, greed and pure selfishness. People somehow do not connect and think that animals are living beings who feel the same as we do or if I may say the same as our pets do! Because there are many so called animal lovers out there who claims their love for animals yet they still EAT them!
This is so hypocritical and so illogically ridiculous but they do not seem to see the connection at all. Totally ignorant because they choose to. I say they choose to because there is so many animal rights and cruelty awareness campaigns out there, you got to be either blind or death to not see it or hear it… it is just pure denial and selfishness. Hence, it is carry out through our disgusting attitude and actions which leads to littering in the ocean and killing more animals.
To be honest I was also part of this hypocritical lot until Rinpoche showed us “Earthlings” the documentary and how Rinpoche himself change his eating habits to vegetarian. That was what encouraged and influenced me to change as well, as Rinpoche mentioned, if we really wanted to practice compassion, we can start with not eating animals. That would be the more basic preliminary action, at the very gross level of practising compassion for us so called Buddhist. That was how it all started and I became more aware of animals and that they are no different from your cute dog or cat that you love so much and would not harm or eat them.
So I suppose we got to keep talking, spreading the awareness and keep educating people tirelessly, creatively, skillfully until they change their attitude and realise we’re all sentient beings who feels. Animals are no different from us humans, they feel pain, when you cut them, they bleed and they fear for their lives. Because just like us humans, they too want to be happy and free! Hopefully from this, many more attitudes and bad habits will change and the world can be safe for everyone to live in happily.
This is an inter-related world; whatever we do will create an impact on the overall ecosystem and hence on the life of others. It is so sad to know that our choice of consumption / choice of products has a direct negative impact on the life of so many other living beings. Imagine finding 276 pieces of plastic, some as big as a toothbrush, in the small stomach of a 90 days old seabird! Plastic, once ingested, can block or rupture the digestive tract and leak contaminants into the bird’s blood stream, resulting in stomach ulcerations, liver damage, infertility and ultimately, death. Also, plastic in the water is a magnet for toxic. Research by marine biologists found plastic floating in the water absorb toxic chemicals that have been washed out to the sea from industrial and agricultural waste, which are lethally dangerous and harmful. As tons and tons of plastic and chemical toxic are being dumped into the ocean every year, the marine life and other life forms that it support, including human life are exposed to the same chemical waste (plastic including) that we once thought casually about. How ironic. We need to relook at our lifestyle and make some significant changes. It is imperative to live our life causing the least negative impact on others possible. We don’t have to literally jump into the ocean to save our friends, little things like reducing the use of plastic count too. Thank you so much Rinpoche for this article to create awareness for the ocean where we all rely and depend on it, whether we know it or not.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article. Every single person in this planet plays an important role to save the earth and also living beings. But this is not the case for unmindful and selfish people. If we throw plastic into the ocean and when the fishes or other sea animals are dead then humans will have lack of fishes to eat (for non- vegetarian people). This is a chain reaction. If we don’t want to lose something we got to do something to save it before it happens.
With folded palms,
Vivian
This is one area we really need to clean up. So many species live in the oceans, even ones we haven’t even discovered yet. Producing 300 million tonnes of plastic a year, is not sustainable and certainly not environmental. Aside from plastics which kill fish, we need to clean up all the other trash, and cut down our carbon footprint. The oceans play a vital role not only for wildlife but it sweeps our atmosphere clean of carbon and other containminents and stores its. Humanity needs to change their ways in doing things. The Earth can survive without us, but we can’t survive without the Earth.