The New World

Some say that there are no more new frontiers in our world today. They claim that every place on earth has been discovered, explored and thoroughly populated.

This is not so.

An exciting new land mass that remains more or less untouched by humanity.

It waits in the Pacific, between Hawaii and California, just ripe for the taking.

There’s one catch, though.

It’s made of garbage.

Though no official name has yet been given this new world,
many are simply calling it the “Eastern Garbage Patch.”

Although “patch” doesn’t quite do the trash mass the justice that it deserves.

Researchers estimate it to weigh roughly three million tons,
covering an area larger than Texas.

How did this modern miracle come to be?
What could possibly create something so mighty?

Well, man, of course.

Man from all the continents of the world has cast his garbage into the sea. The endless swarms of trash drift and drift until they reach an empty, immense and uninhabited area of the ocean where competing pressure zones from around the world come together to create a dead zone for sailors and sea creatures alike.

And now, garbage.

Oh, clever Nature! How she provides!

The foul-smelling eyesore of our civilization’s garbage finds a far-off watery home, relieving us of its odious presence.

Of course we could simply consume less, waste less, create a lifestyle that utilizes our resources in a clean, self-sustaining manner. But why bother when nature provides its own solution?

Sadly, some don’t grasp the beauty of this organic approach. They point to a certain material in our garbage that takes eons to disintegrate — plastics.

They whine that accumulating plastics poison the environment, poison the creatures that consume the plastics and poison all of us in turn.

It’s all gloom and doom.

Have they never heard of a little thing called survival of the fittest?

Embrace the new world, my friends!

Trust in Nature!

[Guest Entry by Andrew Volpe with editorial assistance by SurfingtheSpectacle]

[There’s an excellent article on the subject here and a decent Wikipedia entry here. Check out the NPR radio story or the video series on VBS.TV called Garbage Island which vividly chronicles this subject. We should mention that there’s a Western Garbage Patch, much like the East. And the massive amount of trash in these remote locations aren’t actually piled up like marvelous garbage dumps; it’s a far more insidious blight as the debris floats in immense swaths below the surface, trillions and trillions of plastic particles and contaminants quietly involved in the steadfast destruction of earth’s organic life.]