Plastic is Death

The oceans are the one place where one thinks that nature can heal everything in it. When I was growing up near Bondi we were taught that a dip in the ocean would heal a wound, help repair damaged tissue and relieve muscles strain and so on, Now a dip in the ocean is more likely to cause death than to heal.

This is the 'Throw Away' society and what we throw away is usually manufactured substituted goods for natural products. People no longer know about recycling because most of their trash is plastic and non-biodegradable.

My garbage bin, on the other hand, is hardly ever in need of emptying because by growing my own food and preserving it in GLASS containers, which have been used constantly over the last 30 odd years, there is little plastic entering this house. Most of my trash is recycled in the compost bin where the worms grow and glow through the health of their sustenance.

Plastic floats and breaks up into small sections and some ot it is taken as food by animals who would normally skim the top of the water for delicate morsels. Bottle tops that resemble shrimp are irresistible to birds who are feeding their young. Colored bits of debris resembling small fish are irresistible to bigger fish, and they to bigger fish or sharks, and so on. But the toxicity in the plastic is also leaking out into the ocean and the more there is the worse the condition of the water.

But there is more in the sea than plastic because it has been a dump for all types of things for countless generations. Normal disposal of waste is a hindrance if it is kept on board until reaching shore. Navy vessels, such as that of an Australian crew, was filmed and large plastic bags full of debris and rubbish were being dumped overboard by the crew. This, in spite of having state of the art equipment on board to take care of it. For the sailors concerned it was more convenient to just toss it overboard.

A recently aired documentary on the National Geographic channel showed a lot worse. Ordinances were dumped overboard from war ships are the end of the Second World War. Off the south-east coast of Italy there are hundreds of tons of chemical warfare, mainly mustard gas, containers lying on the bottom of the Aegian Sea. People swimming in the sea are experiencing large open sores on limbs which are extremely painful and hard to heal. Mustard gas eats into the flesh and continues to burn for some time after contact.

There was worldwide outrage when Chemical Ally, as he was dubbed, exploded mustard gas and killed a few thousand Kurds towards the end of the Saddam Hussein rule. The Americans were planning to discharge these canisters over the people of Europe, probably Germany. But the evidence was hidden at the bottom of the Ocean until someone spilled the beans.

Between Ireland and Scotland is another dumping ground where the weaponry is piled in heaps 15 to 20 feet high above the sea bottom. No one does anything towards cleaning it up and bombs frequently wash ashore around the coast of the Isle of Mann.

There are such dumping ground pretty much off the coast of every country involved in that war in the Northern Hemisphere. It is little wonder that there are massive fish kills going on, along with whale standings and other unexplainable phenomena. Isn't it time we woke up? But the problem is too big and blame is shifted until no one is to blame.

We all eat ocean food, such as fish, shrimp, lobsters, crabs, calamari, and so on, but how safe are these things in light of the pollution they are subjected to?

Prawns, lobsters, crabs and many fish species are bottom feeders. They consume the stuff that sinks down, such as in the waters beside the ordinance dumps. So how safe are they to eat? Many have suffered enormous food poisoning from eating certain sea food in some places. Is this the reason?

A recent documentary showed Salmon in some North American Atlantic draining rivers and the amount of plastic and its effect. Here the substance has caused a massive growth of a very dangerous algae which is on the river bottom. The salmon swim to the bottom during the heat of the day to stay cool and they have developed sores or rashes on their bodies. These are very visible and they now think that it is affecting their reproductive cycles as well as the health of the animals. To avoid the algae they are not going down to the bottom as often and scientists think they may be sunburnt. Anyway the stress is having a devastating effect on their health.

Asian rivers are something else. Millions of people live along their banks and discard rubbish, plastic and human waste into the water. It is a soup of unbelievable pollution and some, like the Mekong, are so heavily polluted that schools of fish are floating dead on top. These fish are harvested and eaten and some make their way to packing sheds for export to western supermarkets as frozen fish pieces.

The next time you order duck or dress and cook one think about its life. Where has it come from and what river or water source has been its home? Ducks eat fish and they swim in the toxic waters of the rivers and creeks such as those just addressed.

We may not know that we have been poisoned from eating any of this food until the accumulated effect in our cells and tissues results in some devastating incurable disease in the future. Will that be our legacy?

Every person born jams the planet with more pollution. The millions in Asia is a case in point. The goverments have no control over what people do and they do not provide facilities to take the waste away. They are making lots of money. That's obvious from the wealth that leaders are accumulating. But they are too lazy to clean up the planet because to them it is someone else's problems.

But they are our problems. Our lives and that of our children and grandchildren. If we do nothing we are to blame when the entire fresh water system collapses and the oceans stop producing life. Without fresh water we die.

Think about that when you put on your jewels. How much arsenic has gone into the rivers to extract the gold? How much heavy metal is in the rivers thanks to diamond mining, or any other type of mining? How much CO2 is in the atmosphere thanks to burning fossil fuels in cars and other vehicles? How much methane is pouring into the atmosphere as glaciers melt and peat deposits are warming releasing heaps of gas into the air.

Forests are being felled at an unsustainable rate and so the lungs of the earth are destroyed with them. Trees take in the CO2 and breath out Oxygen but we are chopping trees down and replacing them with more industry, more people, more homes, more cars, more pollution. Is there any chance we might one day WAKE UP? It doesn't matter anymore because you cannot change the masses of humanity that are hungry for plastic and that are ultimately killing us.

Plastic is made from oil and that's another reason to avoid it.

Everything about nature has been despised, changed, altered, overrun, over ruled and out foxed. Man alone now has dominion over the earth and prophesy written thousands of years ago stated that man would eventually bring about his own downfall.

Well he has done it alright. If anyone can say how to stop population growth or how to clean the oceans and the land of pollutants, or how to stop the hunger for money destroying even more of what's left, then that person is a genius beyond the measure of anything we have so far seen.

We have pesticides, herbicides, germicides, and genetic manipulation producing a plastic type of food which grows without the need for earthworms to fertilise it, for climate variation and seasons to help it grow, for bees to pollinate and it now has long term shelf life which stops deterioration and natural decline. We eat food that is tasteless, tough and possible in complete opposition to the nourishment that we have evolved to expect.

Markets have taken over the need for home gardeners, factories have replaced home preserving kits, backyards and garden plots have been replaced by high rise stuffy and unproductive apartment buildings and forests have been replaced by massive farms of mass production that ensures that the plastic life we now lead is maintained. But insects are also affected by changed genetic plants and animals. They too evolved with a certain code that says their cells feed on what is natural, not man made manipulated garbage.

Over population, pollution, death of the basic food chain and a head on collision with common sense have ensured that we arrived at this point.

The Australian Story, recently aired on the ABC in Australia, highlighted the poisoned George's River in Tasmania. Here the oysters were suddenly dying after years of great success. Their shells were malformed and the oysters were unusual in shape inside the shells.

On 22nd February, 2010, it was revealed that " Local doctor Alison Bleaney was concerned about rare cancers among her patients.

Marine ecologist Marcus Scammell had been called in to investigate oyster mortality and deformities.

At the same time, the Tasmanian Devil facial tumour disease was first found in the same small pocket of NE Tasmania. Was a connection remotely possible and was there a link to something in the water?"

It turned out that the plantations of eucalyptus trees upstream and on the mountains beyond, some ten of thousands of acres, had been genetically modified. When tested it was discovered that the toxicity in these normally poisonous leaves was increased due to the genetic change and unlike in normal trees it did not break down in nature. That meant that the poison exuded by the trees went into the water and was killing or affecting everything that drank from it, including humans who relied on the river for drinking water.

The facts remain that genetic manipulation is an alteration of the code that has evolved in the genes of plants to comply with the code of those who eat them or to break down and feed the ground with nourishment. Man has cruelly, unthinkingly and mistakenly taken a perfectly natural good product, the eucalyptus tree, and possibly altered it for all time. The pollution from this action will spread as offshoots spring up and probably cross pollinate native forests. If that happens it is likely that all Tasmania's rivers and then those on mainland Australia will suffer the same fate.

That at the hands of scientists who fail to see that reality, that creation and the perfect order of things should never be tampered with. But who can make man listen to that debate. It is better that we all die than accuse any man of foul play.

We can't reverse the clock and undo all that man has done. We can't go back and undo the massive population that now threatens every living thing.

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