"We" #PlanetorPlastic

Planet or Plastic

After a long day of swimming in the Ocean, I pulled out my laptop and set it on my desk. The words were already beginning to drift into my troubled mind. I set my hands on the keyboard and began to type. 

What do we value more? 

The life giving sea, or the immediate satisfaction of dumping our trash into someone elses world- a world that we don't live in? 

Out of sight, out of mind, has become our motto. 

But now we're finding that the world has changed faster than we could imagine. We realized that the world we had been polluting for so long had always been our world. The "we" had changed, and it was no longer just about people, but the world was shared with other beings, and that became the "we". 

How much time had we wasted, glorifying our own species, and ignoring "inferior" creatures that we hauled out of the sea, billions of them at a time? How much time had we wasted questioning whether or not pollution was an immediate problem, and calculating the years we could spend avoiding the discussions of finding a solution? Every single piece of trash dumped into our water means that more lives are being lost. It's no longer just animal lives, but human lives. 

We found that our world that we live in has become dirtier and deadlier. The problem that we thought was out of sight is no longer out of sight. A manta ray, the epitome of the ever changing sea, should be swimming where it belongs, a wide clean swath of water. But peering through the water, instead of fish, you see plastic. You are completely and utterly surrounded by plastic. Manta ray eat by filtering the water and eating tiny plankton in the water, but Micro-plastics are about the same exact size. This plastic ends up inside it's stomach- a ticking time bomb. 

We live on the sea, but the sea is turning into a plastic graveyard, filled with the plastic bodies of the greater "we". We pull out plastic filled fish from plastic filled water, and ship them to consumers who fill their own bodies with plastic. You are what you eat. 

We are turning into plastic. Our world is turning into plastic. 

When will we stop putting plastic in our seas and start taking it out? 

Will it be the Planet? Or will it be Plastic?   

Maybe this would be an article that people would read and listen to. I thought of that manta ray I had spotted swimming beneath me and wondered how long it would survive. I thought about the few fish I had spotted and the plastic bags drifting by my face. If only more people could see what was happening in the sea, then maybe something in the world would change for the better.