Whales and Plastic Don't Mix

February 14, 2019 12 Comments

When I turn my kitchen sink on water comes out. Usually.

And - it’s perfectly okay, I wouldn’t have it any different.

Except, it’s been a while since I had any plastic. They better fix this immediately or I’m going mad.

 

Now whales get to taste plastic mixed in with water why would it be above humans to do as they do? If it’s good enough for a whale it’s good enough for a human. Humans are as deserving as whales are; it might not be such a bad idea.  

 

While - it’s true Whales eat plastic; they obviously don’t like it. It’s not food you usually find in an ocean. It’s not something you can eat. It was made by humans, therefore cannot be consumed. But you still occasionally see a big whale with a huge tummy full of it. As if they’d eaten it on purpose, you know. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth. No whale gets confused up to the point of not knowing what food is made out of plastic material - and what food is simply flesh. It gets mixed up with some other stuff, catches the whale with her mouth open, and slips right in there.

Not a deliberate action, at all.

 

The sad part of it is that plastic is not a mind. It has no mind of its own. Plastic doesn’t want anything. It’s an inanimate object, and for being an inanimate object it meshes not well in an animate environment.

Humans - they - wallow easily around it. They walk on it. They understand it. Plastic is, after all, a human concept which has sprung out of the human mind.

And no major problem had occurred before, until humans decided they needed more than they needed and spilled over.

And whales knew little about humans; they minded there own business like usual, kept doing what they were doing, kept to themselves like animals do and one ugly day - wham.

Sprayed with a plastic bag.

Can’t even swim in your own swimming pool anymore without running into other man’s garbage.

 

And one plastic bag became two. And two plastic bags became three plastic bags. That is, until three plastic bags became eventually four plastic bags. Without it turning into five plastic bags it wouldn’t be fun, and just as easily five plastic bags turned into six plastic bags. The fun we had by turning four into five stopped, and by turning five into six ended, when a little time went by and multiplied the amount to billions.   

 

Hundreds of millions of pounds of waste, each and every year, is discarded. And that amount isn’t small. We’ve put ourselves in a deep mess and that’s without even mentioning our friend the whale. But, of course, everything is connected: Mr. Whale, lets say it’s a mister, doesn’t live isolated alone in a tight cabin. He lives among us. Not with us, but close to us. We are, lets not forget, surrounded by tremendous amounts of ocean. Our planet is ocean; we just happen to live on the part that isn’t.

And the part that isn’t, is not where we live, but is the part where we fish. Fish is food for humans by the way, not just humans, we understand each other, but humans none the less.

And, we throw plastic in there - in the ocean.

Now, if our friend the whale, to get back to him, wallops one of these bags we feed him, which he’s likely to do, what is going to happen once we get a hankering for fish.

 

I don’t know about you, but when I go out to the restaurant, and order fish, I like to know I’m not eating plastic.

And, yes, it’s totally unfair; you’re not the one shoving plastic down whales’ throats, but you sure as hell might be the one eating the resin pellets and microbeads in them.  

 

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