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!

While sitting in JFK last month reading Green Hermeticism, a book inspired by the eponymous conferences held by the Suluk Academy on alchemy and ecology, I was struck by a quote from the German Romantic philosopher Novalis, translated "the sciences must all be made poetic." I sympathize. Despite the generally laughable efforts of creation "scientists," we (not to be too West-normative) seem to frame faith and science not as complements but as combatants. Rationalists and nonbelievers feel like Romans watching barbarians approach intent on sacking our institutions and libraries; the religious feel that their concerns are ignored in favor of the sweeping indoctrination necessary for our liberal, humanistic society. This image of Christ and Darwin fighting bareknuckled in a steel cage is, of course, oversimplified and polarized in a way to appeal to the idiots on either side. The complex relationship between Faith and Science isn’t inherently a conflict, and its substance isn’t all evolution and fluff.

There are a great many areas of fascinating and unusual intersections between the natural sciences and spiritual belief; the "Law of Attraction" popularized in The Secret claims provenance in quantum mechanics, specifically the (heavily disputed) interpretation that the observer’s consciousness causes wave function collapse. ("What the hell are you talking about, Fluxy?"). Does human (or other) consciousness affect the universe in a demonstrable physical way or is it just pseudoscientific rubbish? Beats me, but all my attempts to materialize a ziti pizza whilst writing this article have failed. I call bullshit!

The Bahá'í, Faith teaches that science and faith are harmonious, with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá writing that

Philosopher Karl Popper rejected classical empiricism, the idea that theories can be "proven" through observations of the natural world, in favor of a standard of falsifiability. A scientific theory can’t be confirmed, only proven false or found to "correspond with the facts." I tend to view the world in a manner similar to this: a collection of plausible explanations and non-falsifiable theories rather than a world ordered by Cartesian rationality or by the hand of deity. As such, I have a hard time grokking the die-hard atheists or the true believers; I apply Fluxy’s Razor to everything.

So, back to Green Hermeticism. The authors argue that the beginnings of the Enlightenment occurred as a battle between non-dualist Rosicrucians and dualist Cartesians. Isaac Newton wrote more about alchemy than about physics, but eventually the worldview we’ve come to associate with him won out. Later, Romanticism and its affection for the natural world were crushed by Industry and the inevitable clash between capitalist and Marxist ideologies. So homeboys suggest that we revive our sleeping hermetic tradition and take the Gaia hypothesis to the next level; that we create a joyous spiritual ecology that recognizes that we are part of, not separate from, "Nature."

Nature: It’s not just national parks anymore!

This isn’t really new. The movement called "deep ecology" has argued essentially the same thing for years, albeit from a less alchemical angle. But consider this:

Not to be too much of a frou-frou new age hippie ("too late!" you say), but to me, there’s something worthwhile to such a worldview, and not just in the Fluxy’s Razor sense. We are part of the vast biological system that is this planet. Some people wonder if we’re the cancer afflicting Gaia, but being the happy-go-lucky optimist that y’all have come to know and love and loathe, I suspect that perhaps we are her brain. If we can accept that spirituality has a healing effect when used judiciously and graciously, then why not act as the soul of that which has come to be called creation? I’m not talking about communing with your crystal dolphin inner child in the name of the great mother goddess (although if that blows your skirt up, by all means, go for it.) No gods necessary, but perhaps a little faith in ourselves and our ability to change and to heal our world. Without that, we’re stuck in fatalism and in death.

In 1982, stood before the Nobel assembly and spoke of the soul of Latin America:

García Márquez was speaking of the ability of humanity to triumph over tyranny and disaster, but this optimism applies just as powerfully to the world in which we live, so long as we use all the tools available to us, be they "Religion" or "Science." Science informs us, and spirit (whatever that may mean to you) inspires us.

Nothing is written. Everything is permissible, possible, and alive. So now, my chilluns, go out and change the world.

Flux got really drunk and started writing a leftist spiritual manifesto that revolves around hilarious, tongue-in-cheek pantheism a few weeks ago. She promises that this article isn’t an attempt to fish for prospective book deals. She swears.

A six week search of the Yangtze River in China proved fruitless for scientists searching for signs of the baiji, also known as the white dolphin. It has been declared the first large mammal to become extinct in modern times.

August Pfluger, the Swiss co-leader of the joint Chinese-foreign expedition and founder of Baiji.org, blamed apathy for his foundation's inability to raise sufficient funds to counteract the environmental impact of overfishing and shipping traffic.

There's the possibility that the dolphin is still to be found in eastern China, but it won't be in the numbers needed for a sustainable population. Even if scientists were able to find a pair to breed in captivity, there must be sufficient genetic diversity in order to maintain a healthy group.

The Baiji.org Foundation will now turn its efforts to the conservation of other freshwater dolphin species, such as the Yangtze finless porpoise.

Unfortunately, it's likely this won't be the last extinction we see in our lifetimes.