So, you think an Island 2000km away from any continent is "paradise"? MUST SEE VIDEO

Originally posted by facelift
reply to post by CALGARIAN

 

Did anyone else start to get misty-eyed at 2:04..?

I felt a mix of sadness for the birds, and contempt for the perpetrators of their condition.

Originally posted by TheEnlightenedOne
I'm not sure what's more heart breaking, the fact that birds are dying due to our lack of care to our world or watching the agony and suffering depicted in their dying seconds.

1 thinks Both TheEnlightenedOne, for these effects have a cause and when you look at the cause you.. Tend to feel somewhat responsible well 1 does.

NAMASTE*******

maybe design biodegradable container/lids/plastics and use existing plastic found on the plastic islands as material to build artificial ICE mass for Polar regions...

Brutal! Some of those dead birds had more plastic in them than bones!

How hard would it be to take a trolling boat with a fine net and start collecting all that floating garbage?

Originally posted by The Cusp

How hard would it be to take a trolling boat with a fine net and start collecting all that floating garbage?

Theres no wood pulp with ink on it to be made cleaning the place, so in the current state of the world, that makes your suggestion as probable to happen as the hungry getting fed and the homeless getting housed.

reply to post by Donahue

Seagulls are probably the most annoying, waste of space, animal on the planet.

They're albatrosses, not seagulls.

The plastic bits I saw were empty lighters, caps from bottles and little vials of lip bam and sunscreen or makeup. You know the complimentary stuff you get aboard cruise ships and hotels on vacation? Round the world people use these little one shot products and then pitch them... somewhere.

They are designed to be lightweight and most of them will float. Even if discarded on land, they may still end up in the ocean because they are small enough to go down drains and sewer outlets. The little caps have a seal in them that traps air. Same with the lotion and chap stick vials or lighters. As this stuff moves out to sea it stays afloat forever out there.

The albatross is a sea borne bird spending long periods of its life above the ocean, searching for food which it swoops down and grabs. Brightly colored plastic bits resemble their diet. Bits of fish and crustaceans that rise to the surface from feeding frenzies involving bait fish and predators.

The dead birds photographed in the video packed with this stuff died as a result of their bodies digestive track being clogged with it. They literally starve to death. When a big ocean storm comes a long, it will sweep the island clean of all the stuff on its surface and all that crap will return to the ocean to be ingested by marine life again and again.

Very powerful and tragic vid. Too many people are careless and ignorant of the harm they cause. More people need to see this vid and be aware.

This is exactly why we need population control, too many people and the resources are slowly disappearing

Originally posted by muse7
This is exactly why we need population control, too many people and the resources are slowly disappearing

Or just better teaching of how to better conduct and deal with pollution perhaps from teachers or our Elders who may have better plans and ways to fix.

Thanks Calagarian for sharing this

Originally posted by CaticusMaximus
reply to post by grayeagle

 

Its so easy to recycle, and even easier to throw stuff into trash cans... but its amazing how few people can be arsed to do it if the trash can is more than an arms length away, and god forbid they actually have to WALK to get to one.

Its rather disgusting.

Actually I dont think disgusting is a good enough descriptor for it....

Repugnant feels more accurate. They are repugnant... on the inside.

Sadly the only thing that has value in recycling is aluminum, everything else is bad for the environment to recycle. The carbon footprint left by recycling paper & plastic greatly out weights any good that recycling those items would do.
a) Take recycling to depot
b) recycling depot sends items off to the docs (boat docs) and sometimes the vehicles can be left idling while waiting at the docs
c) boats bring the items to other countries like China
d) once off the boats they are again loaded on to trucks to be taken to the recycling plant

Not too mention the fact that they bleach paper & plastic during the recycling process and more times than not, the bleach gets into the ground.

Let's not forget how bad plastic is.

Its bad in most oceans. Midway island is particularity bad, as ocean currents send a lot of junk right on by it.

And like everything, there are two pictures for every one story.

I have sailed large sloops and cutters all my life, I know we are responsible for a lot of misery on the oceans.

reply to post by Donahue


Some of us appreciate what the world has to offer.

Some of us don't mind giving our cars a bath after a day at the park.

Some of us do our best to protect what we have whether we like it or not.

I'd rather wash my car because of a bunch of birds in the park than constantly wash my hands from a lot of the humans I come into contact with daily.

So sad, the human species is a plage on the world. Some may wonder if it will be a celestrial object that will cause our demise here on earth....It will be us & our fault alone IMO. When you(we) really start to look around and take notice, there is junk and very un necessary stuff everywhere. I don't know if there's any turning back from what humans have become or done, I really don't. S&F quiet a dis-heartening video

reply to post by CALGARIAN


After watching this is it that hard to believe that the elite want to take out about 6 billion of us. Look at what we are doing to the one place we all call home.
Pisses me off to look at this. It doesn't seem to matter that some countries manage to do their part in keeping things decent. Bottom line is most humans are living in the third world an just don't give a f*ck.
This whole world is screwed!!!

As sad as this is and I agree that we should all do our bit to protect the environment, a child dies every minute from Malaria. Point being that many species indirectly cause the deaths of others on a daily basis. It is not just humans that kill.

Please though, where you can... ALWAYS recycle plastic. Paper and food biodegrade within months, most plastics takes centuries! If not for the sake of the other creatures we share the planet with, for the future generations of humans as most of this plastic finds its way back into the food chain which ultimately causes many cancers.

ID like to thank the author of this thread for pointing out this place and set of islands to me ...

You just inspired me to raise enough money to buy these islands, move there , and turn it into my own country.. because somebody needs to be there to clean up and take care of the wild life .

my youngest daughter loves all animals and im encouriging her to become a vet. im a vegan and and think im prefect for the job..


one of my dreams is to own my own country and live by simple means away from the norms and the screw up sociaty of the whole world .. the question is how to i raise the funding plus id need to petition the federal government etc and that could take years ... as the upkeep for this project will not be cheap, ill be needing communication lines to the outside world and greenpeace. as they dig protecting places like this .... who here likes this idea of mine ? ..

Originally posted by CaticusMaximus

Originally posted by boncho
Some people can't watch videos, some people don't have the patience, we'd rather read and see pictures if they are necessary to get a message across.

I say birds being cut open with plastic inside. Not sure what the story is about...

Complaining that the length of a 4 minute video is to long to watch... wtf?

For some reason I cant help but perceive that attitude as somehow integral to the enabling of the atrocity shown in the 4 minute video that "some people dont have the patience" for.

Hmmm... wonder why that is.

edit on 2/21/2013 by CaticusMaximus because: (no reason given)

Ah yes, the convenience of modern day technology also sometimes burdens us with things like multitasking on our smartphones, our business computers or generally doing 2 to 3 things at once. Also, the 4 min videos of YouTube, whatever would we do without them?

Sorry my attention span is demanded by other things. I am forever in your debt it seems.

Still not sure what the OP video is about entirely.

But I'm sure in the days to follow, you may lay down your grand wisdom and reflections about the topic you've come to conclude.




I read at about a rate of 1145 words per minute by the way. A four minute video is about four thousand words of detail in a technical article.

Or is seems about 5 seconds in the original post of this topic.


By the way, for the people who are so ADD such as myself, some background on the topic (which probably took less to find than watching the video):

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses.

The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.

~ Chris Jordan, Seattle, February 2011 In 2009, Jordan began travelling to Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. What he found and photographed there is sickening. Inside the stomachs of dead baby albatrosses he found deadly plastic waste from human civilisation that had found its way even to this remote place. The photographs he took are macabre and disturbing. These intimate portraits of death by plastic are strangely beautiful, yet behind each photograph is a story of pain and suffering that tears at your heart. I've included a selection of his photographs below.

friendnature.wordpress.com...

The video in the OP is a trailer for a video being released by Chris Jordan it seems:

Midway Film Project can be found here.

The Chris Jordan Midway film project (Journey to Midway) focuses on the atoll of Midway, which sits in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, 2000 miles from the nearest continent. The atoll is inhabited only by birds, but is more famously known for the all-important World War II naval battle which dealt a crippling blow to the Japanese Navy.

In this touching trailer for the project, the reasoning behind the Chris Jordan Midway film project becomes evident. Though birdlife is prolific on the atoll, its large colonies of albatross are the most notable and appear to be the focus of the film’s implied accusation of human indifference with regard to non-degradable plastic waste.


Read more at americanlivewire.com...

The environmental report outlinging how the 19 Albatross types facing extinction can be found here.

Surprisingly, the study was done between 1984-91. Before quite a few people on this board were even born I gather... Which means, some odd person must have had ADD 20 odd years ago to miss this the first time around.

Remind me again how I have ADD....

Originally posted by The Cusp


How hard would it be to take a trolling boat with a fine net and start collecting all that floating garbage?

A lot harder than you would imagine. Environmental cleanup is profitable so long as government is covering, advocacy groups are pushing the issue, and people are willing to part with their money to fund it.

During a recession however, forget about it.

If you pumped every resource we had just to take away our impact on the world, there would be none left to keep us alive. A sad but true reality of our destructiveness as a species.

Oh well... There's always mars.



Terraforming and all that...

Originally posted by Sublimecraft
reply to post by CALGARIAN

 

I feel ashamed.

Our oceans are becoming dumping grounds that many people are oblivious to.

I travel between Australia and Malaysia monthly and the crap in the ocean from Bali northwards all the way to Malaysia is mind-blowing - if it's man-made and floats, you can guarantee it's there.

The Indonesian Archipelago is by far the worst, not only with debris (plastic bags and sandals are the worst) but the colour of the ocean is also disgusting.

MARPOL regulations (Annex V) have recently been implemented and now pretty much nothing is allowed to be dumped overboard except ground-down food scrapes - and even then you must be 12nm off the coast. Good luck enforcing that - some people just don't give a ship!

Like I said, I am ashamed, after watching that, the Booby Birds deserve better......much better, we are irresponsible for allowing the planet to get to such a despicable state in the first place.

S&F

edit on 21-2-2013 by Sublimecraft because:

Prob;em now is that since the Indonesians have destroyed and polluted their own fishing grounds, their fishing fleets are movind ever so much closer to Australian waters. And there have been many incidents where they have been found less than a mile off the Aussie coast doing the same thing they did in their own waters.

Originally posted by CALGARIAN

DISCLAIMER!!!! VIDEO HAS SOME DISTURBING FOOTAGE

warning people of reality. we're doomed