Albuquerque, NM

I like GAIA..for secret reasons… so here’s an editoral/article. There’s plenty more where this came from: www.thesun-news.com
The graphics and ads are as interesting as the articles. I think I have my Aunt Martha’s gene for ads. www.popsantafe.com It’s in these minute details, like the link above. The front cover painting image is apparently by Lynden St. Victor Pop Gallery Water St. It’s actually small print…

Gaia or Garbage, The Choice is Ours
While we were working on the last
issue, Skip comes into the office and tells
me he wants to do an article about garbage
in the ocean. Seeing as there’s plenty of
garbage right here on land, like in
Washington D.C. for example, I didn’t quite
understand why it was such a high priority.
Then I took a look at his references.
Folks, we have a serious problem. The
long and short of it is that there is a
continent-sized patch of floating garbage
in the Pacific Ocean the size of the USA, or
twice the size of Texas, depending on which
source you use. Not only does it make the
ocean ugly, it makes it poisonous. And
here’s where the information got so
disconcerting that it is putting some real
muscle behind my desire to use those
canvas bags more often at the grocery
store, and to grow more of my own food.
Plastic is toxic folks, to wildlife and to
humans. Very toxic. Here’s some of the data
compiled by Susan Casey for her article
“Plastic Ocean.”
“At the same time, all over the
globe, there are signs that plastic pollution
is doing more than blighting the scenery; it
is also making its way into the food chain.
Some of the most obvious victims are the
dead seabirds that have been washing
ashore in startling numbers, their bodies
packed with plastic: things like bottle caps,
cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and
colored scraps that, to a foraging bird,
resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by
Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces
of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All
sea creatures are threatened by floating
plastic, from whales down to zooplankton.
There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the
pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band
strangling its shell into an hourglass shape;
a humpback towing plastic nets that cut
into its flesh and make it impossible for the
animal to hunt. More than a million
seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and
countless fish die in the North Pacific each
year, either from mistakenly eating this junk
or from being ensnared in it and drowning.
Bad enough. But Moore soon learned
that the big, tentacled balls of trash were
only the most visible signs of the problem;
others were far less obvious, and far more
evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as
a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule
pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the
eye, swirling like fish food throughout the
water. He and his researchers parsed,
measured, and sorted their samples and
arrived at the following conclusion: By
weight, this swath of sea contains six times
as much plastic as it does plankton.”
As I read on, I started to feel a
deeper appreciation for my wife’s visceral
allergy to plastic. She’ll tell anyone who
will listen that plastic toys are harmful to
children. Although she generally means it
in a metaphorical way, it turns out to be
literally true. Casey goes through study
after study documenting the high-risk
dangers posed by plastics. The most
dramatic of them all was the discussion of
“nurbles” the little plastic pellets that form
the raw material of all plastic finished
product. Here’s where I started to take some
vows: “Ask a group of people to name an
overwhelming global problem, and you’ll
hear about climate change, the Middle East,
or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite
the sloppy transport of nurdles as a
concern. And yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets
of plastic in its rawest form, are especially
effective couriers of waste chemicals called
persistent organic pollutants, or POPs,
which include known carcinogens such as
DDT and PCBs.
The United States banned these
poisons in the 1970s, but they remain
stubbornly at large in the environment,
where they latch on to plastic because of
its molecular tendency to attract oils.
The word itself—nurdles—sounds
cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon
character or a pasta for kids, but what it
refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing
up to a million times the level of POP
pollution in their surrounding waters,
nurdles become supersaturated poison
pills. They’re light enough to blow around
like dust, to spill out of shipping containers,
and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and
creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily
mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that
would very much like to have such a snack.
And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna
or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals
are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now
account for 10 percent of plastic ocean
debris. And once they’re scattered in the
environment, they’re diabolically hard to
clean up (think wayward confetti). At places
as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook
Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New
Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A.,
they’re commonly found mixed with beach
sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000
grant from the state of California to
investigate the myriad ways in which
nurdles go astray during the plastic
manufacturing process. On a visit to a
polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as
he walked through an area where railcars
unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed
that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine
plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw
windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a
fence. Talking about the experience,
Moore’s voice becomes strained and his
words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s
not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact
that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed
with these plastic particles. What are they
doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish