Pacific Garbage Patch on The Colbert Report

I'm catching up on my Hulu queue this week, after a big lag over the holidays, so it wasn't until this morning that I saw Charles Moore as Stephen Colbert's interview guest.  Captain Moore is the one who first discovered and identified the Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre while sailing back to Los Angeles from Hawaii.

Captain Moore has become the figurehead and primary spokesman for what we could call The Plastic Problem.  Plastic floats, it drifts, it flies, it sails.  It gets washed into the storm drains during a rainstorm, and carried out to sea, and then it ends up in the North Pacific Gyre where it has an infinity of time to entangle jellyfish, fill the bellies of albatross chicks, and tempt sea turtles.

Stephen Colbert raised an excellent and common question, why can't we just strain all that plastic out of there?  The answer is two-fold: first, it wouldn't be possible to strain out the trash without straining out every single scrap of sea life at the same time.  From turtles to zooplankton, it's just not possible to catch plastic while sparing their lives.  Second, what would be the point?  Where would we put it?  As soon as you take it out, more continues to wash in.  It's like sweeping back the tide, in a very literal sense.

As Captain Moore pointed out, it's better to focus on keeping it out of the ocean in the first place.  In a sense, the Pacific Garbage Patch is the cows that have already left the barn.  We need to figure out how to close the barn doors before we go trying to catch those escaped cows.  Or as Captain Moore puts it, there's no point bailing out the bathtub until you turn off the taps.

For ages people have been seeing the three-arrowed green symbol, and for most people it means "recycle."  But look more closely and you'll see that it's actually three Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  And the least of those is Recycle, an expensive, wasteful process.  Better to simply reduce your consumption, and reuse what you already have.

The problem is what I call "good driver syndrome."  Everyone thinks they're a good driver.  So who, one wonders, is having all of those traffic accidents?  The truth is that we all have room for improvement as drivers.  Hurts to hear it, but it's true.

The same goes for ecological projects.  Everyone who's interested in this kind of thing thinks they're fairly green.  That's true for everyone, up to and including the person who changes nothing about their lifestyle except to buy an aluminum water bottle and some grocery store tote bags.  They may never use those items, but hey, they bought them!  They're living the green lifestyle!  (I'm not just exaggerating, either - I'm describing someone that I know personally.)

In an interesting way, the green movement has dovetailed with the current recession.  A few years back, people were wondering how much the public was willing to pay for a "green premium."  If you could buy a cell phone that was manufactured with zero carbon footprint, how much more would you pay for that cell phone compared to a conventional one?

The answer, as is plain for all to see, is to not buy a new cell phone.  I know it sounds un-American, but it's true.