Global plastic pollution: the scale of the problem

Sea of Trash, a compelling report on the growing problem of plastic trash in the world's oceans in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, has some photos that floored me, especially this one:

I was half-raised by 1970s TV and I'm hypersensitive to such images, probably due to heavy exposure to those PSAs in which an ashen-faced ersatz Indian sheds a tear as he surveys a trash-desecrated landscape. (Am I wrong, or did they air those about every 20 minutes during the Saturday morning cartoons?) Looking at this image really unsettled me -- this is a beach wayyyyyy out in the wilderness on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. No one lives there. And yet it's literally a dump. The picture, like the video of the North Pacific Gyre's "plastic soup" I wrote about a few weeks ago, instantly makes clear how FUBAR is humankind's use of plastics. As reporter Donovan Hohn writes,

The Encyclopedia of Coastal Processes, about as somniferously clinical a scientific source on the subject as one can find, predicts that plastic pollution "will incrementally increase through the 21st century," because "the problems created are chronic and potentially global, rather than acute and local or regional as many would contemplate." The problems are chronic because, unlike the marine debris of centuries past, commercial plastics do not biodegrade in seawater. Instead, they persist, accumulating over time, much as certain emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. The problems are global because the sources of plastic pollution are far-flung but also because, like emissions riding the winds, pollutants at sea can travel....

To me, Gore Point seemed like the scene of an unsolved environmental mystery — unsolved and possibly unsolvable. Who, if anyone, can be held accountable for all that plastic trash? What, if anything, does it forebode for us and for the sea?

Tell me you don't get the heebie-jeebies reading that. How will we, as a species, evolve so that each of us is able to live within arm's reach of oneness? So that individually and in groups we see the consequences of our actions, and make more responsible choices?

Some observations about solving this problem in my next post. Meanwhile, a few interesting reactions to the Times story. And one from my OnEarth colleague Molly Webster!