Twice the Size of Texas

I have read several articles over the past several months about the huge gyre of trash in the Pacific Ocean that turns in upon itself, pulling in more and more detritus from our throw-away lives. Today's New York Times had another story on the Pacific garbage patch, "an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas." The idea that not one but several such tremendous toxic turds of human waste exist is really rather difficult to comprehend. And so the smaller evidences of our indifference seem to capture more clearly the monstrous consequences of the myth of convenience: the anecdote of the rainbow runner caught by researchers that had 84 pieces of plastic in its body and the picture in The New York Review of Books of the baby albatross, dead and eviscerated on a beach, revealing the many pieces of plastic its parents had fed it, thinking the colored bits to be food. The picture of that baby bird is more horribly eloquent than anything more that I could write here.

Oh, and this is depressing, too.