It seems a shame to me that nowadays "protecting the environment" is virtually synonymous with "curbing CO2 emissions", which means that serious issues like ocean pollution get very little attention.
Eat young fish. Typically, in a given body of water, mercury level in a fish is directly proportional to its age. Avoid, if you like, large fish (e.g. tuna, marlin, swordfish, shark) and small fish which take a long time to mature (orange roughy, grouper, etc), but don't be afraid of all seafood.
Coincidentally, eating small fish is much better for the marine ecosystem as well. They are much more difficult to overfish (not that humans haven't figured out how).
Not that coal is the source of all of our ills, but I have read that to elevated levels of mercury pervading the environment are primarily from coal plant stack emissions. Given this, I wonder why it isn't a diplomatic issue between, say, Japan and the US or Japan and China?
It is. Reducing China's dependency on Coal is a huge priority for both China and the international community. It was a big point of discussion during last year's talks at Copenhagen.
On a related note, my school (Washington University in St. Louis) has recently changed the labels on all trash cans from "Trash" to "Landfill." It's amazing how much that little switch makes you think carefully about everything you're throwing away. If you can get people to truly understand the consequences of what they're doing, the majority of them will change their ways.
> On a related note, my school (Washington University in St. Louis) has recently changed the labels on all trash cans from "Trash" to "Landfill." It's amazing how much that little switch makes you think carefully about everything you're throwing away.
And what do people do differently?
BTW - the above seems to assume that the US has a landfill shortage. It does, but only by choice.
The US tries to recycle some things that don't make economic sense to recycle today. It would be better to simply collect and store these things until it does make sense to reclaim them. Landfills are ideally suited to this purpose.
Yes, it's dumb to recycle when it doesn't make economic sense. Subsidies are waste. You'd think that folks who claim to care about waste would understand that and actually walk their talk.
What am I thinking? People do things because of how it makes them feel.
This change was accompanied by a switch to single-stream recycling - that is, all recyclable materials can be deposited in one bin and sorted later. From what I've seen, this change has significantly increased recycling.
Could you give some examples of goods that don't make sense to recycle currently? I certainly believe that could be true, I just haven't read anything solid about it.
> This change was accompanied by a switch to single-stream recycling - that is, all recyclable materials can be deposited in one bin and sorted later. From what I've seen, this change has significantly increased recycling.
If the two changes (signage and single bin) happened at the same time, why the claim that signage was significant (and the omission of the single bin omission)?
> Could you give some examples of goods that don't make sense to recycle currently?
Sorry - I stopped tracking these things when I figured out that folks didn't care about the economics. I'm reasonably sure that they still exist because people are still people.
Great idea, I'm all for it. You seriously ought to contact the right people and try to make this a reality, I think it would prove to be very effective and actually bring about some positive change.
I would sponsor this out of pocket in a heart beat:
a) Get a bunch of those posters printed up.
b) Put together a candid http://www.thefuntheory.com/ type experiment documented on video showing how behavior changes with an in-your-face message like this.
c) Let the YouTubes do the rest - drive people back to the CC licensed poster, have pushed out in local communities.
Anyone know why an albatross would feed this stuff to its chicks? I don't mean that in terms of comparing an albatross to a human (as in, I can tell that a bottle cap is probably not a good thing to eat) but comparing it to other animals - a cat or an eagle say - that come into contact with a lot of the same objects on land. Is it a question of intelligence (that albatrosses are just not very bright) or maybe desperation (if it looks like it might be food and you can't find anything else it's worth a try)?
From the article: "[The parents] soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young."
In other words, the albatross fly over the water, and when they see small, colored things floating near the surface, they assume they're small fish or other edible things. Up until quite recently (on the scale of albatross evolution), this was a pretty safe assumption.
So, no, low intelligence and/or desperation aren't implicated; rather, it's a matter of habitat and how prey are identified.
That sounds like a decent explanation, but won't they sense that something is wrong when they touch these objects? I mean stuff like plastic caps are stiff and hard, while fish are not. May be the fact that they evolved to swallow their food instead of chewing it may make it harder for them to distinguish a fish from a plastic cap even when it's in their beak?
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason might not have something to do with the fact that the birds do not chew their food but rather swallow it whole.
It may also have something to do with the bird's gizzard: some species of birds regularly consume rocks to grind food in their gizzards. It's possible that the plastic items are substitutes for the rocks.
From the Wikipedia article, it sounds like the plastic is not the worst threat to the albatrosses, but it's certainly a graphic one.
- cat or eagle specifically look and wait for prey
- albatross and other marine birds and animals do look for prey as well, but they don't have the luxury of wait or the ability to choose what parts do they eat
I saw the remains myself when I visited Midway a few years ago. It's very shocking, especially the large number of disposable lighters... where do they all come from? Laysan Albatross chicks on Midway are also dying because those in nests near buildings eat the flaking paint and end up with lead poisoning.
Thankfully, things are actually improving. Laysan numbers have increased in recent censuses and the species appears to be on the rebound. Thanks maybe in part to President Bush including Midway and several other atolls used by albatross in the National Marine Monument that he created.
During the breeding season every flat surface is covered with birds. It's one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
Some pieces of the Running the Numbers series are currently on display in the Museum of Science in Boston (which is otherwise a joke except the probability machine in the math room which is really cool :)).
I'll probably be downvoted for this, but I can't help but think that precisely because it's killing them, it exerts an enormous selection pressure on albatrosses. Nature is also cruel.
On the other hand, you might consider that nature is cleaning the garbage patch.
We've given up on being able to clean the garbage patch saying its impractical to go out there and fish such widely dispersed trash from the ocean. By this, of course, we mean "too expensive".
Nature has dispatched the cleaning crew to do it for us at an almost unimaginable cost. The albatross seems an almost perfect instrument for flying out there, spotting, and picking up exactly as much trash as it can carry and then returning it to land.
Hopefully the selection pressure you speak of will yield a method of collection that doesn't cost a whole bird for each load.
Does anyone know if other animals do this? Is that the presence of garbage combined with the birds' inability to taste plastic as well as their inability to regurgitate? That seems like an extreme environmental 'mismatch'. Sad.
I'd be interested in understanding what the ethical issue at hand actually is. Is it:
a) the unintentional destruction of life
b) the possible reduction of biodiversity or
c) the fact that animals are being killed that don't supply human food chains?
What are people so shocked and distraught about? Most of us contribute to the destruction of life by eating meat and to the reduction of biodiversity by occupying many environmental niches that would have otherwise harbored other species. Frankly, c is not an ethical issue for me, as death is an essential part of life, and it always contributes to some food chain.
I'm not able to make the connection between some dead birds that happen to have eaten a human contaminant and all the outrage/shock etc in this discussion. So I'm hoping that someone will connect it for me.
for real, reusable bottles are great. Though I suppose there is some debate over bisphenol A in nalgene bottles and it's just one more thing to carry around for some people.
I carry a metal bottle, and NALGENE is now moving to stainless steel bottles.
It would've been great if we'd just skipped all the steps between canteens and going back to metal bottles, though. That whole 80's-00's trend of making products disposable to increase sales and profit margins was really a waste.
Oh, yeah, it's still going on, but at least the tide of "in the future everyone will use disposable cell phones and computers" articles has died down a bit.
