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After several days of strong on-shore winds, this debris washed up on miles of beaches at Placencia in southern Belize. Every day the beach-front resorts employed teams of people for clean ups.
Photo by Warren Resen

By WARREN RESEN, member of the Florida Outdoor Writers Assoc.

...and getting smaller every day. If you have ever heard the lyrics to this song, you know how maddening they can be. The words keep repeating in your head like elevator music. But the words are all too true. What happens in South America, Asia, Africa, North America or anywhere else, no matter how far away, affects us all. We learned long ago that you can’t dump garbage in a river to get rid of it. It shows up someplace else, and the oceans have lost their capacity to dilute pollutants from the land.

Florida’s reefs are distressed and dying and not just from “global warming.” The sewage we pour into the oceans, far enough off shore — or so we thought — comes back to haunt us somewhere else. How can you convince a farmer or golf course manager in Wisconsin that the fertilizers being used there are helping to kill the Florida reefs?

The residue from the fertilizers washes into local rivers which flow into the Mississippi River. The Mighty Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Currents in the Gulf pick up some of this material and eventually it finds its way into the current sweeping around the west side of Florida and then up the East Coast, depositing nutrients on the coral reefs of John Pennekamp Park in Key largo, thousands of miles from its source.

I’m not picking on middle America, just using this example to illustrate the point that planet Earth is a closed system. In a loose way, it illustrates the old maxim of physics that “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Now take the case of carelessly discarded plastics, that famous word from the old movie classic “The Graduate.”

Almost anything carelessly discarded on a city street or up in the mountains or anywhere else, no matter how far away, eventually affects all of us. Many industrialized countries have recycling programs. The poor countries generally do not. It’s a toss it and forget it philosophy. Wherever I travel in the world, the ubiquitous plastic water bottles littering the ground are legion.

In the Pacific Ocean, unseen and unknown to most, is a floating island consisting almost entirely of plastic residue that grows yearly in size. Currents pick up the garbage which eventually finds its was to this remote location, a man-made Sargasso Sea. Naming rights for this emerging plastic continent are up for grabs.
The photo at left was taken on the beach at Placencia in southern Belize this past August in an area famous for snorkeling and diving. It’s where divers flock to see the yearly migration of the magnificent Whale Sharks.

After several days of strong on-shore winds, this debris washed up on miles of beaches. Every day the beach-front resorts employed teams of people for clean ups. The next morning, it was back. It was at that point that I realized that community beach clean-ups, the work of so many civic minded people to keep their beaches clean, is nothing more than a feel good event. It’s about as effective as beach renewal in the long run. The garbage is out there. The amount keeps growing. But as long as it’s not washed up on the beaches, people have little concern. To quote another old saw, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’

On this side of the globe, in the Northern Hemisphere, if the plastic does not wind up on the beaches in Central or North America, it will continue its journey, caught in the prevailing ocean currents until at some point it might find a home if not on a populated beach where it can be removed, then on a deserted beach resting until the waves and winds again send it again on its journey. Remember, plastic has a very long life, much longer than that of the people who disposed of it somewhere in the world. As famed artist Walt Kelly used to say in his old comic strip Pogo, ‘We have met the enemy...and he is us.’

I am not standing on a soap box preaching the evils of plastic on the world’s environment. I just want to point out a growing problem, invisible to most people. A partial solution? Maybe an enforced deposit on each bottle. Someone will pick them up to cash in, even for a few pennies. However, it’s not something the manufacturers or bottlers would sanction without strict enforcement by state or federal authorities and another can of worms.