In the dark auditorium, I found myself awash with tears streaming down my face. Fortunately, this part of the movie was loud enough that the kids sitting nearby couldn’t hear my uncontrollable sobs.
Stop kidding yourself! Recycling is not cleaning up the mess we're making.
This was not some romantic comedy chick flick. The movie that made me sob so strongly was Bag It, a movie about plastic bags. Our school’s PTA environmental committee set up a community wide screening. The deep grief had come bubbling up as I watched endless images of floating plastic swirling around in the ocean. I’d seen these images before and I was more than well aware of the carcases of birds at Midway island filled with pieces of plastic. If you haven’t seen photos of these birds, I strongly suggest you click here to see some.
Somehow I was now face with close to 50 years of abuse that we had brought upon the earth. In less than one lifetime, we created so much of a mess that I truly don’t know if the plants and animals including us humans, will recover from the destruction that our industrial civilization has wrought upon our planet, our only home.
As a kid, the word “pollution” packed a big punch for me. My brother and I used my grandpa’s old wind up Super 8 camera to try to make a pollution movie. I remember tossing garbage on the ground in the woods for my big brother to film.
Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ, where my dad worked. When I was a kid, I thought the scientists would solve the pollution problem.
I scoured my dad’s TimeLife book series for more information on pollution and learned about something called “smog”, a type of air pollution in a far away city called Los Angeles. The more I read in the TimeLife series, the more concerned I became about air and water pollution. My mom assured me the scientists would take care of it. My dad was a physicist and electrical engineer working at Bell Laboratories. We’d visit him at work and see giant computers that took up entire rooms, we saw laser beams and fiber optic cables.
Somehow science and innovation would fix whatever needed fixing. That was the myth that helped me sleep at night as a kid.
But here I sat, 40+ years later, watching a movie about plastic and how it is killing life on the planet. No amount of innovation, no new found magical plastic eating fungi was going to undo the mess we’ve made.
The giant swirling patch of plastic garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean, 2 times the size of Texas continues to grow. A plastic soup in which plastic outnumbers plankton by a factor of 40 to 1. For animals in the ocean that feed on plankton, there is 40 times more plastic than food.
In less than one lifetime, mine, we’ve seen pollution grow to the point that our continued existence on this planet along with millions of other species is now in question. The guilt I fee being part of this pollution making system is tremendous.
As a culture, we’ve made quite a mess out of things. Happy Earth Day
