I was listening to a news program yesterday and heard a strange thing. A captain of an ocean cruiser found a giant patch of garbage floating in the ocean between Hawaii and California. It was mostly plastic and had come from the beaches of Hawaii. Isn’t it odd that more hasn’t been said or done by the environmentalists to prevent this from happening? This is a serious matter which can destroy the Pacific Ocean through the destruction of all marine life. As fish and whales ingest the plastic, it disrupts their digestive system, and could get tangled up in their gills and starve them of Oxygen. The plastic leeches chemicals into the water because of the salt and destroys the plankton which feeds the fish and whales, and therefore could deplete the ocean of all fish and animal life. If we are not more careful about picking up after ourselves when we are at ocean beaches, our oceans might just become empty, and our food supply endangered.
I am not a radical invironmentalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that we can carelessly do whatever we want and not have consequences. If we continue to treat our oceans and rivers with comtempt by throwing our garbage in them, we will reap the consequences of our actions. The third law of motion by Isaac Newton says it like this; to every action there is always oposed an equal reaction; or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. The first part is the beach partier who throws his/her plastic beer can holder, or plastic bag on the beach. They forget it and the tide comes in and takes the plastic pieces into the ocean. A fish swallows it thinking it is food, and that piece gets caught in its digestive tract. Some other predator eats the fish and the plastic is now inside the predator, and they both die because of one piece of plastic. If that happens often enough, the food chain will reach a critical mass and die. We are at the top of the food chain. What happens if our food is contaminated because the plastic from the beach ends up in a fish we eat. That is the equal and opposite reaction. The cycle of the food chain is one which we can control by carefully taking care of our beaches. I’m not out to kill your fun at the beach, but it behooves us all to take care of our resources. We never know when they might just come back and bite us somewhere.