I can’t help but think if people saw where their trash went, more of them would recycle. Especially now that recycling is easier than ever.

Turns out, the biggest landfill in the world isn’t on land at all: it’s in the middle of the ocean. It swirls around in two large masses called the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches (because of currents called ‘gyres’). One expert compared the gyres to a toilet that never flushes. Nice image. The Eastern Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California, is bigger than Texas and growing. That’s one huge toilet, if you ask me.

I’ve had the distinct pleasure of driving across Texas a few times at its widest point, which generally takes about 12-13 hours. From El Paso to Shreveport, just over the Louisiana border, it’s 822 miles.

Imagine driving all that way not only with trash covering the road under your tires, but covering the surrounding landscape with no end in sight. That’s a whole lot of trash.

HowStuffWorks has a good explanation of why the garbage patches exist:

In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It’s the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

For you college football fans, did you know that the Los Angeles river carries enough garbage each year to fill the Rose Bowl two stories deep? The Christian Science Monitor reported last year that “Globally, millions of tons of trash enter the ocean each year. Between 60 and 80 percent of it is land-based, washing into streams and rivers and finally the ocean from landfills, storm water discharges, litter, and sewage overflows.”

Unfortunately, because of environmentalists’ over-emphasis on wildlife in talking about environmental issues, and not enough on implications for humans over the long haul, a lot of us don’t give a second thought as to where our trash goes or how much of it we produce.*

I don’t claim to be an expert or even learned in these matters. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand a pile of trash the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean. Which is to say nothing of the vast landfills, beaches, rivers and streams full of rubbish.

I realize that only a handful of people who know me read this site. And so I post this as one friend to another, only meaning to encourage us all to make small efforts on a regular basis. Recycling isn’t hard work, it only take a little sacrifice. Common sense says that our waste takes up finite space. So why not save a little of it (space, that is) and drop off your bottles in a recycling bin? If everyone does something small regularly over time, it adds up significantly. The but-I’m-only-one-person-so-what-can-I-do excuse doesn’t really hold up. This is and will always be a community project.

Take a look at this multi-media presentation by the Los Angeles times for more info on the garbage patches in the ocean. Part four deals specifically with trash.

Click image to view presentation.

*Note: Please don’t get me wrong here: I do believe that we should take care of animals, and work on their behalf as stewards of the earth. Ultimately, the well-being of one species is the well-being of another, and so it goes throughout this web of interconnectedness we call life on earth. But placing wildlife above human suffering, for instance, hasn’t helped win the hearts of skeptics.

So, you’ve heard me toss his name around here or there, you’ve seen some quotes in previous posts. Here’s a good portrait of Berry that Smithsonian Magazine did a couple years ago, if you’re so inclined:

Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, has lived in sight of the Kentucky River for 40 years, in a landscape where generations of his family have farmed since the early 1800s. The river is probably the only mainstream close to his heart. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he has produced a body of political thought, in a series of essays and speeches, that is so Jeffersonian it seems almost un-American in today’s world.

Berry argues that small farms and farm communities are as vital to our liberties now as they were in Jefferson’s day. The agribusiness corporations and developers that have all but replaced them, he warns, are eroding our freedom along with our soil. In a recent essay, “Compromise, Hell!” he writes: “We are destroying our country—I mean our country itself, our land….Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.”

Continue reading the article >

My old pal Ben keeps me abreast of what’s happening in the Global Warming debate. He sent this article to me last night written by the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. In it, Lomborg calls to task the Patron Saint of Warming, Al Gore, and accuses him of propagating “climate porn”:

Al Gore and the many people he has inspired on the global-warming issue have good will and great intentions. However, he has gotten carried away and come to show only worst-case scenarios. This is unlikely to form the basis for a sound policy judgment. Indeed, if we follow Gore’s recommendations, we will likely end up choosing very bad policies - ones that fail to solve the problem, yet are so expensive that they divert resources from areas where we can save many more lives, at far less cost. In short, Gore’s prescriptions would in effect present an obstacle to saving millions of lives.

The best science does indicate that global warming is real and man-made - and Gore deserves applause for making global warming cool again. But statements about the strong, ominous and immediate consequences of warming are often wildly exaggerated. This is also strong Gore territory - and here he deserves a severe reprimand.

We need a stronger focus on smart solutions rather than excessive if well-intentioned efforts. And we also need to put global warming in perspective: Climate change is not the only issue on the global agenda, and actually one of the issues where we can do the least good first.

That said, the warming debate presents an opportunity for America to reclaim its leadership, both enacting sensible global warming policies and smartly addressing the many other ills of the world.

Warming Is Real

Global warming is indeed real, as has been pointed out several times by the U.N. Climate Panel (the so-called IPCC). Over the coming century, temperatures will likely increase about 5ºF. The total cost of global warming is anything but trivial, about $15 trillion. Yet it is only about one-half of 1 percent of the total net worth of the 21st century, about $3,000 trillion.

Yes, the media often carry far more dire descriptions of warming’s consequences. Gore, for example: “We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.” A fine phrase for such talk is “climate porn”: This kind of language makes any sensible policy dialogue about our global choices impossible.

It is also simply wrong. Consider two outstanding examples of Gore’s claims - heat deaths and sea-level rise.

We often hear about global warming causing more heat deaths - but very little about cold deaths. It is true that, for example, the temperature rise from global warming will probably cause 2,000 more heat deaths in the United Kingdom by 2080. Yet studies indicate that the same temperature increase will also decrease cold deaths - 20,000 fewer U.K. cold deaths by 2080. Mentioning 2,000 more deaths, but not the 20,000 fewer cold deaths that go with them, is no basis for sound policy.

Check out the rest of the article here.