In Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, a seaman abuses nature by shooting an albatross which had been following his ship for weeks across an empty ocean. To his shipmates the bird was a good omen, and killing it a bad one, so they force the shooter to wear the body of the bird around his neck, to mark the seaman as the guilty party. It does them no good; the curse falls upon the ship and crew anyway. They are becalmed; the whole crew save the mariner die of thirst. The mariner’s fate is to witness it all, and suffer, and is then commanded to bear the tale back to those who never left the land.
Which is apt as all hell for the picture below.
This is a baby albatross photographed on the Island of Midway, 2000 miles from the nearest continent. The young birds starved after being fed so much plastic garbage that their digestive tracts shut down before they were old enough to fledge* and leave the nesting colony.
*The albatross has one of the longest infancies of any bird, with some species taking as long as 270 days before taking flight. Once they do, it will literally be years until the next time its back on land, which doesn’t happen until its old enough to breed.
In this case the cause of death is plainly visible in the colored plastic pieces that were inadvertantly fed to the the yound bird. But for so many suffering youngsters in our modern world, it isn’t quite so easy to see the reasons for their suffering. It may be somethng so simple as common household chemicals in the home environment. Whether it’s the mother bird who feeds the wrong food or the human mother who does what she thinks is best for her child which turns out to be quite the opposite, we are all in this together and suffer the consequences for our ignornance.
Humans… as a whole, at least during this long adolescence we are going through ourselves, just can’t seem to learn to clean up after ourselves… Or to care much about what happens to others because of it.
Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he’s drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.
I’ve seen a couple of stories that some of the stimulus money is going to clean up abandoned fishing nets that were destroying the ecosystem at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and somewhere out on the west coast. That’s a glimmer of light that may have an bit of an effect.
(I just needed to pass along some good news today as paltry as this news is comparatively speaking.)
Puget Sound. One of the local TV news programs ran a story about it a week or two ago, complete with underwater footage of some of the mess they’re trying to clean up.
