No Man is an Island
Evidence of our actions is everywhere—even on a remote Pacific atoll.
By Joe Spring
Five years ago, I spent my summer crushing light bulbs. I worked alone and at night, when the pop and crunch of glass beneath my feet shattered the calm of darkness.
I camped on a six-acre, treeless burp of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My job, during June and July of that year and in the three summers since, involved circling the island from sunset to sunrise tagging threatened Hawaiian green sea turtles.
At night, hundreds of the 200-pound green reptiles crawled onto the island, where they threw sand behind them into two-foot-high mounds. They dug two-foot deep pits to lay their eggs, turning the island into a series of sand moguls.
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Comments
I read a great deal of environmental reporting. This is one of the most clear-minded and poetic insights into the environmental crisis I have seen in a long time. Joe, a photo of a dead albatross chick with a stomach full of plastic would have driven the point home very graphically. Packaging and single use disposable goods discharged from land-based urban centers are not only the main source of debris, 90% of it is plastic. If we want seriously to combat global warming, we should stop developing and wasting the all the resources that are used in the manufacture, transport, and disposal of all this packaging and man-made detritis.
Posted by:Miriam Gordon |June 7, 2007 4:49 PM