Just what a blind species we are — in the sense of showing hardly any capacity for foresight — was brought home to me again recently when I read a short article in TIME magazine on James Cameron’s visit to the province of Alberta, Canada, at the request of indigenous peoples, to see first-hand the “oil-from-sand” (or “tar-from-sand”) operations there which are endangering the natural environment in which they live.
His visit demonstrates the power of the media in making people aware of certain issues, in this case the film, Avatar, directed by Cameron, and the question of rescuing natural habitat from exploitative companies. It is a moot question, of course, whether the indigenous peoples of Alberta have reason to trust in Cameron’s ability to assist them, given his celebrity status, but one thing seems to be sure — having directed Avatar, Cameron seems (please note: SEEMS) to have been conscientised to the extent that he has taken on the role of championing real-life causes resembling that of the fictional Na’avi in the film. How authentic his motivation is, is anybody’s guess, but we need all the help we can get to rescue what is left of nature against marauding, money-hungry companies.
To be sure, it is not entirely fair of me to associate “blindness” or lack of foresight with all of humanity — there are many people worldwide who are showing foresight through having realised that the majority of people are sleepwalking towards a catastrophe. Such people include a group of staff members at the university where I teach, NMMU, who have formed a group to look into ways of mitigating the effects of climate change. The sad thing is, however, that this is woefully inadequate if one’s goal is to rescue nature, and concomitantly, all living creatures on the planet, as demonstrated so clearly by the reason for Cameron’s visit to Canada.
One has to start somewhere, of course — I know exemplary colleagues who have installed solar-panel heaters in their homes, as well as water tanks to catch valuable rain water; all of this helps. Or one could attempt to do something in a broader social and economic context, by, for example, approaching floor managers at supermarkets — as I do regularly — and point out to them that they should try to persuade top management of the store (or chain) to stop using plastic bags at till points (most people still use them, even though they are now for sale, and no longer free in SA), because plastic is one of the most underestimated enemies of nature, given its virtual indestructibility.
Hand in hand with such indestructibility goes its flipside, which is plastic’s eco-destructiveness — something that conveniently escapes most people’s attention. It is a fact that — as a TIME cover article showed not too long ago — scientists have discovered it to have serious deleterious effects on human physiology and metabolism in the course of using plastic food or liquid containers, because of the chemical interaction between the containers and the food. And dumping plastic in large quantities in nature is VERY deleterious for animals and plants, as well as for marine creatures.
There is a scene-sequence in one of the most famous Hollywood films noir, The Graduate, where newly graduated Benjamin Braddock (the noir detective character, searching for the meaning of his life) is confronted by one of his father’s friends at the party given in his honour. This older man, exuding all the fake “wisdom” of someone who knows he is supposed to share some profound nugget of wisdom with Benjamin on this auspicious occasion, tells the latter that he would like to say only one thing to him. With Benjamin a captive audience, with no option but to listen to this imminent pearl of wisdom, he proclaims solemnly: “Plastics, Benjamin, plastics!” It is appropriate that The Graduate is a film noir, that genre of cinema that is predicated on the irredeemable corruption of human society — it is almost as if the director, Mike Nichols, was prescient about the “corruption” (contamination) of the natural world and its inhabitants that would emanate from this vaunted miracle of polymer technology.
At least this realisation seems to be sinking in slowly, as may be judged by the following. The University of Canberra in Australia recently announced that it is introducing a complete ban on sales of bottled water on its campus — evidently the most far-reaching ban of this kind in Australia. What gives one hope about this news is the fact that the idea came from students, who were assisted by a group appropriately called “Do Something”. According to the latter, this amounts in practice to preventing the sale of 143 000 plastic bottles every year. In their place, students will be provided with free “water bubblers”, which were also provided in Bundanoon (in New South Wales), after plastic water bottles were prohibited there in 2009. Water will also be sold on campus in non-plastic re-fillable containers.
The advantages of abandoning the use of water in plastic bottles are many. For one thing, their use costs Australians half a billion dollars a year. Moreover, drinking water straight from a “bubbler” is healthier, and in light of existing evidence, cutting out all that plastic will make a huge environmental difference. It takes about 200ml of oil to manufacture a plastic bottle, as well as — astonishingly — up to 3 litres of natural water to produce 1 litre of water bottled in plastic. In Australia about 43% of plastic bottles are recycled, so one can infer that the rest are deposited somewhere as trash or as landfill. Even retailers on the university campus have agreed to the phasing out of bottled water sales.
Another powerful sign that plastic is being looked at with new, no longer enamoured, eyes, comes from the skipper and crew of the Plastiki, a most unusual catamaran (and from the boat itself), which is buoyed, in its hulls, by 12 500 plastic bottles. David de Rothschild, younger member of the well-known banking tycoon family turned eco-adventurer and activist, and his crew have been sailing their singular craft around the world from San Francisco to Sydney for a number of months, with the purpose of drawing the world’s attention to the egregious levels of human pollution of the world’s oceans and to their interminable (but possibly terminal) overfishing.
Not only have they discovered, according to De Rothschild, how vast the oceans are, but also how simultaneously powerful and fragile they are into the bargain. The sea’s power is easy to comprehend in light of their accounts of the boat being buffeted mercilessly by huge swells and severe winds, while — more to the present point — the fragility of the ocean was conspicuously evident at the “Eastern garbage patch”, or the floating island (or continent) of mainly plastic debris. De Rothschild’s description of this phenomenon, which is nothing less than a horrendous assault on the oceans, makes it apparent that descriptions of it that are available on the internet, just cannot capture its enormity and pervasiveness.
Invisible at first, once one has noticed it, you discover that this gigantic garbage patch consists of something like a plastic “soup” — millions and millions of plastic fragments covering an area the size of Texas. Situated in the north Pacific Ocean, at a point where the sea forms a slowly moving vortex because of prevailing weather conditions, it was first noticed about 12 years ago, and since then oceanographers have estimated that about 100 million tonnes of extremely durable plastic are suspended here.
The very durability of these polymers is what makes them so inimical to nature. And evidently, together with relentless overfishing, it has left its mark on the oceans, in so far as the UN Environment Programme estimates that ocean-borne plastic debris causes the death of about 100 000 marine mammals and more than a million seabirds annually. Moreover, as De Rothschild reminds one, the tiny plastic fragments that pervade the world’s oceans are ingested by fish and other marine animals, and because humans eat “seafood”, these particles are passed up the food chain to us — hardly a reason for rejoicing, although some might say that we deserve every health hazard that we have to face because of this. “We all do it,” says De Rothschild. “We throw this stuff, this packaging, what I call dumb plastic, into the bin, and we think it has gone. But it comes back to us one way or another. Some of it ends up on our dinner plates.”
As may be gathered from the boat’s name, the Plastiki, it has been named in honour of Thor Heyerdahl’s (c)raft, the Kon-Tiki, with which he crossed the Pacific way back in 1947. It is nothing less than historical justice that his grandson, Olav Heyerdahl, has been on the Plastiki for part of the voyage, and a comparison of the condition of the oceans during the two respective journeys is instructive. Both the documentary film and the written account of Kon-Tiki confirm just “how alive”, in De Rothschild’s words, the sea appeared then. The crew of Kon-Tiki actually had to throw fish, which had jumped onto the raft, back into the water.
By contrast, the crew of the Plastiki have seen hardly any marine creatures, which left them wondering where they were. It was easy for Heyerdahl, back in the forties, to survive on fish, but in months the Plastiki sailors have only caught a couple of fish, and not for lack of trying. De Rothschild and his crew have experienced first-hand what one reads about, namely that 80% of the fish populations of the world have gone — through human intervention in the guise of overfishing and the pollution of the oceans, especially in the form of plastic. When will humans finally put a stop to these (self-)destructive practices? When it is far too late (if it is not already the case)? Or are these few signs that I have listed an indication that a turning is slowly happening?
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