If you read Paul Miller’s “The Plastics Paradox” in the January 13, 2008 Denver Post, you’ll see the results of humanity’s disgusting disregard for its planet home. Miller reported, “This stew of plastics and marine debris, at least twice the size of Texas, is floating in the Pacific Ocean some 1,000 miles off the West Coast—called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch…it’s a 3 million ton waste dump…with 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on every square mile of ocean…by some estimates, 8 million pieces of plastic litter enter oceans and seas every day…even land-locked Colorado plastic may end up blowing into the oceans.”
How do I know it exists? I witnessed it in my travels from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Oceans in Antarctica.
Why does Peter Coors float to the top of this “Plague of Plastics” decimating our natural world in Colorado? He stands with hundreds of big company owners across America that spent millions to defeat deposit/return bills initiated in the 70s. When Colorado citizens tried to initiate deposit/return bottle bills in the 70s and 80s, Coors along with American Bottle and Can Company spent millions of dollars to defeat a bill similar to Michigan’s. Anyone that visits in Michigan will never see cans, glass or plastic in their lakes, streams or rivers because kids snap them up for a 10 cent reward per container.
Coors defeated our initiative twice in Colorado that resulted in an unending stream of plastic, aluminum and glass pitched, tossed and left in every nook and cranny of Colorado. You see bottles floating on rivers, lakes, parking lots and every road. You’ll see containers left everywhere! Whereby Coors, who earns $13 million a year, could have done something positive for Colorado, he chose to make even more money. I asked him why he did it. His representative answered that it was only an eight percent waste stream created by not recycling plastic, aluminum and glass beer and pop containers. Anyone who can rub two IQ points together could tell you that eight percent times 10 years adds up to billions of bottles, cans and plastic containers tossed into the Colorado wilderness.
In my world travels from the Arctic to Antarctica, humanity holds nothing sacred on this planet. I’ve sailed and Scuba dived across all the oceans and seas. I’ve rafted or canoed rivers from the Amazon to the Mississippi to the Yangtze. I’ve explored all the Great Lakes to many unknown lakes. I’ve walked on the Hawaiian to the Galapagos Islands to Ross Island at the bottom of the world. I bicycled along the North Sea in Norway and around Lake Titicaca in South America.
At every location on our globe where home sapiens inhabit, humanity throws its trash in every conceivable form.
But by far the most dangerous--any way you cut it, plastics prove themselves humanity’s worst invention. Ubiquitous, forever, deadly and ugly!
As a teenager, I Scuba dived in pristine waters from Lake Huron, the Hawaiian Islands, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. I saw magic at 40 feet below the surface on coral reefs! Incredible beauty! Thirty years later, my dives carried me into the most disgusting sights on the planet. Plastic drift nets, cut away by fishing captains, killed innocent sea life--forever! For the past 40 years, humans have tossed their plastic containers, pop tops, diapers, billions of bags and every kind and size of plastic trash into our lakes, rivers and oceans. Plastic destroys everything it touches.
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