Imagine sailing across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. You are hundreds of miles from the rest of humanity, cruising the North Pacific Gyre, the converging vortex of oceanic currents that covers ten million square miles between East Asia and North America. You might just be the farthest possible distance from any other human on earth. The. Middle. Of. Nowhere.

And you are sailing a sea of trash.

It has come to be known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. At the center of the gyre collects the trash that both Asia and America spill into the sea. The majority is our fantastic plastic, wonderfully photodegradable into tiny particles that, on a molecular level, never stop being plastic. An area the size of Texas (the conservative estimate), or twice that of the continental United States (a more expansive one), in the middle of the fucking ocean, is full of our polymers.

Ocean researcher Charles Moore has been studying the patch for years, estimating that in the center of it is something like one million miniscule pieces of plastic per square mile. (Remember, of course, that this is not just a few square miles but around a million.) Recently, the good folks at VBS.tv, the televisionary subsidiary of Vice Magazine, went on board with Moore to go document "Garbage Island" themselves. Thomas Morton of Vice describes the samples he pulled up with the crew (a merry band that keeps it interesting over the week-long haul to the center of the gyre) as, like, "snow globes made of garbage" -- garbage that is eaten by little things that get eaten by bigger things that get eaten by us. The documentary is absolutely shocking and incredible and disgusting, and I can't recommend that you watch it enough.

However, I will warn you in advance that you will get really fucking mad.
Ever since I first heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I have been hyper-aware of how ridiculously and precariously we deal with the world. Humanity, the pack of glorified monkeys that we are, has decided to see no evil. Places that might have never been seen by human eyes are already full of our refuse.

Efforts to clean up the large pieces have been haphazard at best. But the majority of the plastic littering the ocean are the tiny bits so poetically known as "mermaid tears." I can't say I blame the mermaids for crying. Or the albatross for hanging 'round our collective neck. Because by and large, we can't fix this mess.

80% of the plastic in the gyre comes from land; it's not the cruising bourgeoisie. It's everybody in California and Japan who has ever thrown out a plastic bottle or a spork. We are colonizing the sea with our garbage. It is beautiful and terrible irony that this garbage climbs up the food chain so that we end up ingesting it (and all those lovely flavors it has). We are saturating the world and ourselves with our wickedness and then feasting upon it.

While trying to figure out the angle I wanted to take with this article (besides, you know, complete unabashed horror and disgust), the good old Anglo myth of the Sin-Eater came to mind. Instead of absolution through handing sin-tainted bread to the beggar or village fool (or maybe we're all the fools now; I don't know), we are caught in a complex cycle of consuming our own transgressions. We are eating our own sins; they saturate the earth.

Like I've said before; we've got to learn how to sacrifice. As I write this, my adopted home of North Carolina is taking in ballots for the Democratic primary. I console myself in thinking that, hey, at least if Obama doesn't win we'll be one step closer to apocalypse. I don't want to give up on humanity just yet, but if massive catastrophe goes down, at least Mama Earth will get a little break.

And then I realize: God damn, I'm a cynic.

Ever upward, I guess.


Flux is wishing that she had come up with this angle sooner. "A vote against Obama is a vote for Ragnarok" is so catchy!