Email This Post
Trashing our oceans…why our addiction to plastic is destroying the planet and mutating our bodies.
Taking a shortcut while sailing in the Pacific in 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered what is now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating landfill of plastic bottles, bags, bottlecaps and other debris, twice the size of Texas. In the middle of nowhere, he saw garbage floating by his vessel every day for one whole week.
Captain Moore tells Kathleen how our plastic footprint is now worse than our carbon footprint, and it’s killing and distorting millions of birds, fish and marine life. Distorting as in disrupting their sex hormones–creating a new breed of franken-fish that lead to big health hazards for humans. (This mariner actually abstains from eating fish, knowing that it’s full of toxins and endocrine disruptors.) He explains how the garbage gets into the ocean in the first place and offers advice for minimizing plastic in our daily lives. (Yes, you do have options.)
A third generation resident of Long Beach, California, Captain Charles Moore founded Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994 and found his calling on the high seas that fateful day in 1997. Ever since, Captain Moore has dedicated his time and resources to understanding and remediating the ocean’s plastic load. Along with collaborators from the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, he developed protocols for monitoring marine and beach micro-plastics which are now used from the remote beaches of Polynesia to the United Nations Environmental Programme in Europe.
