Cleaning up!

Cleaning up the world!

     I walk in the Golden Gate park everyday with my friend Jakob, a mini poodle! I've made it my job to pick up all the plastic debris I see left by humans! I do this so that it doesn't end up in the Pacific as part of the Pacific gyre! My collection includes all the cigaret filter tips that are tossed away! I don't mind people smoking, if that's what they want to do, I do mind that they throw the filters away, because these are toxic and fish think they are food, eat them and die! There's so much to collect! Plastic bags, plastic cutlery, plastic food containers, styrofoam containers, the list is endless. Most of the time I end up with a plastic shopping bag filled to capacity with the debris I find. I limit myself to plastic and some foil, because the paper products will deteriorate quite quickly and are not damaging to the environment, whereas the plastic will still be around for centuries.

     No one wants to take responsibility for  cleaning the amassed rubbish in the Pacific, which grows larger and larger by the minute! Some bright person needs to think of a way to do this that would make money. I heard about someone in Europe who developed a water vessel that sucked up garbage and turned it into fuel. They were using this system to clean up rubbish in the Atlantic. This needs to be done in the Pacific before the rubbish extends so far it fills the whole ocean. At the moment it's 90 feet deep and larger across than the whole United States! That is a whole, helluva lot of garbage.

     I often try to talk to people and ask them not to toss their garbage onto the street, while also telling them about the Pacific gyre to try to open their eyes to the problem. They often say the street is not the ocean and I ask them if they've ever heard of the wind! The street I live on extends all the way from the eastern to the western side of the top of the San Francisco peninsula. Ninety percent of it goes in a straight line, which means that it doesn't take much for the wind to blow a light plastic bag all the way from downtown San Francisco to the coast and out to sea. One day this beautiful ocean will be nothing, but garbage! I hate to think of all the children born today who will only have this picture I took of the Pacific to know what it was once like!