My Friday began by seeing a heart wrenching story about the death of a  whale. This gentle giant of the deep had been beached in the Netherlands and died. I have checked various sources and the stories vary on when it happened but the  same  bottom line exists. this dead whale had pounds and pounds of plastic in it's belly and the death was due to intestinal blockage due to the ingestion of the unnatural substance - plastic.
     It is called the Pacific Flotsam or Pacific Garbage Vortex. This place out in the middle of the expanse of the ocean where the currents carry all the mess that finds it way to the ocean :  be it polythene plastic bags, bottles and containers, plastic drums, polystyrene packing material, polyurethane foam pieces, pieces of polypropylene fishing net, discarded lengths of synthetic rope, traffic cones, disposable lighters, six-pack plastic container rings, vehicle tires, drink can and bottle koozies, condoms, syringes, toothbrushes, and all variety of non-biodegradable trash.
     These great gatherings of plastics also become ''chemical sponges'', places where toxins adhere and linger. The plastics do sometimes begin to break into smaller pieces or pellets, These are easily digested by marine animals and birds, filling digestive tracts with non-digestible plastic, plastic that is also laden with toxins.
     The pictures are available for anyone to view all across the web  and in other publications, you know them, the turtle deformed into an hour-glass shape as it had a six pack container ring stuck around the middle of it's shell as it grew, the dead seagull cut open exposing the belly full of plastic.I was a girl in elementary school when I was shocked and horrified by a television special  explaining what pollution was doing to our planet and wildlife. I took my camera then to the creek at the end of my block the next day and took photos of the litter in the water and the rainbow oily sheen upon the water and I sent the photos in letters to newspaper editors and presented them to my teacher hoping to change the world .
   

I am a greying grandmother now and I fear for the climate changed world my grandbabies are inheriting. As a teen i swam in the beautiful pacific and now Fukushima is irradiating it and jellyfish are turning to blobs of slime.Usually I walk in nature seeking peace and soul soothing and I photograph the miraculous beauty I stumble upon. After reading of the whale and new declaration that the African Black Rhino is extinct I walked along the river and in the woods and  today I did shoot photos of ugly   human presence I see even deep in the woodlands. 

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.  ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

 We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.  ~Janet Holmes à Court

The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.  ~Loudon Wainwright

 Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.  ~Edward Abbey

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature.  We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.  ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990

 
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907

 This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile.  Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages.  But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped.  ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.  But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer.  Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.  ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897   

 Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.  ~Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959