Dakota

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All the good citizens here at Dakota have been harping recently about the plastic waste problem and, if nothing else, resisting the guile of the corporatocracy by weaning ourselves from the water bottle .

If you didn't catch the film "Plastics in the Ocean" the first time round, seize the moment.

Perhaps that was not sufficient inspiration to motivate a change of habit, an inconvenience, which is why we'd like tp introduce the North Pacific Trash Vortex to you. It is undoubtedly one of man's largest creations.

The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of AN AREA THE SIZE OF TEXAS swirling slowly around like a clock. This gyre has also been dubbed “the Asian Trash Trail” the “Trash Vortex” or the “Eastern Garbage Patch”.[caps are ours]

You can see the interactive maps here if you scroll down.

Still can't pass up that Fat Footprint Fuji? that Evil Evian? that Derivitive Dasani? According to NPR's "Living On Earth", no baby boys being born to Arctic indigenous people.

In certain villages in northern Greenland something is completely out of whack—only girls are being born. These reports from villages near the U.S. Air Force base in Thule are now being explored by scientists.

But studies conducted a few years ago now coming to light show that in other Arctic regions, the sex ratios of babies are also out of kilter. In 2004 the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program found a correlation between exposure to PCBs and shifts in the sex ratios of babies born to indigenous mothers living in the northern reaches of Russia. PCBs and other persistent organic chemicals such as pesticides travel from industrial countries up the food chain into the blubber of marine mammals.

Will we have to put human males on the Endangered Species List before we can convince the populace and the corporatocracy to stop disrespecting the earth? Looking on the bright side, maybe this is nature's way of lowering world testosterone levels.

Photo note: A metaphorophoto. Fish in a vortex going downhill and a stop light facing the wrong way.

Posted by Dakota at September 24, 2007 03:40 PM