Our Oceans are Under Attack

[Boston]

IBP, Tyson, etc. package the food in supermarket ready packages before it even leaves Iowa.

and thats the problem
it went to Iowa

try watching this series
this is one of five
feel free to go look up a few more and find out how ridiculously stupid the way we handle food is



as far as overfishing is concerned
you are right Eddie
no one wants to change or find alternative lifestyles
so in the end
we will end up with no fish at all
good idea
we'll do that

as far as banning plastics is concerned you are also right
no one wants to change or find alternative lifestyles
so in the end
we will end up buried in the ****
good idea eh
as long as we dont go blaming the industries that knew there product was permanent and uncontrollable in the environment
you are right on the money there friend
lets just just dump another 240,000,000 tons of it in the ocean this year and see what happens


as far as developing a local type economy conducive to energy and resource conservation
you are right again
lets just ship all our food around the planet in a nice plastic bag a few times and kiss our ecosystem goodbye rather than grow what we eat a little closer to home and place limits on imports, exports and other wasteful practices
I gotta admit you are absolutely right
what was I thinking

oh now I remember
I was hoping to leave something for the next generation
not likely to happen eh

at some point like it or not the human race will be making some hard decisions
the sooner we make em
the less painful they will be

[masalai]

Huh - we pay that now!!!! 780 or some such for my 39' sail boat as an annual registration fee + all the other expenses like disposing chemically treated poo in one or two facilities along the entire Queensland coast (I exaggerate a little)....

Next boat will have to be around 100 feet to carry and have ****-loads of extra stuff-spaces for services that one will have to carry....

fasteddy106, those days will return with a wallop when fuel runs out... No transport, no tractors, meat will arrive 'on-the-hoof' for you to butcher, grow your own vegetables and do not forget to keep some seeds for your next crop and pray that they do not get contaminated (cross pollinated) with GM stuff (as part of the gm process is to make sure pollination will be sterile so you are forced to buy the seeds from Monsanto etc..) and send all your seeds sterile.... - If you haven't got solar / renewable energy then sun-dry or salt/pickle your meat and other foods or starve...

N Korea now has the A Bomb (a test last night), other extremists, sooner than you think...

Become very self sufficient - not all that difficult - I will be quite comfortable on a small remote island North of NZ/New Caledonia.... If you stay on mainland USA then do not advertise your position with smoke from cooking fires - else you will attract thieving 'bandits' to your refuge...

[fasteddy106]

So the cure is to ban plastic huh? Okay, lets start with your stuff, you toss responsibly all your plastic, reduce it, recycle it whatever and get back to us in a couple of months and let us know how you are doing. Love to see you find a GPS without plastic. Oh wait, you don't have a boat according to your profile, got to be sure to file your responses in the wtf file.

[masalai]

hehehe

[Boston]

am way ahead of you Eddie
I dont need to toss anything cause I bought responsibly in the first place
do you really think anyone who actually knows about the evils of plastics would still be using em when its so easy to avoid
I dont think this response deserves a list of items Ive been able to find with metal or glass replacing plastic components but its not so hard if you actually make an effort
buy the way I have a nice 50 cc syringe (for vetting the horses ) still kicking around here somewhere all glass and metal with two rubber o rings
thing ended up being the best purchase I could have made rather than keep using (disposable?) plastic ones, saved me a fortune.
Thing is most people are completely lazy and would rather sit around and criticize the efforts of others than actually make any meaningful changes themselves.
sad thing is that kind of apathy from the unwashed masses is what's going to negate any efforts made by the folks who give a ****
guess you might ask yourself which you wish to be
part of the problem
or part of the solution
sounds like you have made your choice

all those folks who want to see the other guy make changes before they are willing to make there own are pretty much why we are in the mess we are in

the bigger question is
what gives you the right to destroy the place for all of our kids
you might find out just how easy it is to avoid what 90% of the plastic products foisted on us by industry
if you cared

try going to a local market to buy your food ( probably didn't go round the planet a few times before they stuck it out on the shelf )
a farmers market for the veggies ( not much plastic there )
a local butcher for meat products ( they still use waxed paper )
the solutions are endless
all you need to do is try
course its far easier to just deny that any problems exist isnt it
besides denial makes it easier to just ridicule the efforts of others

B

[bntii]

Originally Posted by masalai

If you haven't got solar / renewable energy then sun-dry or salt/pickle your meat and other foods or starve...

Become very self sufficient - not all that difficult - I will be quite comfortable on a small remote island North of NZ/New Caledonia.... If you stay on mainland USA then do not advertise your position with smoke from cooking fires - else you will attract thieving 'bandits' to your refuge...

masalai- you might very well become one of the last hold outs..... like some Japanese soldier after the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda

"Masalai... come out, come out, the recession is over...."

[Boston]

ya but he has a point on the self sufficient end of the spectrum
nothing quite like creating a home were you can fix all your own stuff
keep it simple
keep it down to what you really need
grow your own

its got a logic to it that is hard to argue with

hey Mas
what your plan to combat Scurvy
horse radish or lime juice
or do you plan on raiding the islands for woman and supplies

har har har

hows the boat coming mate

[fasteddy106]

Boston, for a guy who obviously is smart you are amazingly dense. Don't you find it a tad odd that you are a bit out there on this issue. I know a lot left wing environmentalists and none advocate the positions you do. Your approach is immature also. It's ban plastic, period. No compromise at all in your world. Worse yet your intellectual immaturity is pretty obvious, you won't talk about clean up or alleviation because you are afraid that might weaken your already lonely position. After all, if we can clean it up why ban it. You leave no wiggle room, it's your extreme radical position, and everyone else is lazy, stupid, ignorant, evil, apathetic. Unwashed masses huh? Wow, tad elitist don't you think. You ask what gives me the right to destroy as if I were a wanton polluter. What gives you the right to sit in judgement from a self awarded throne, and a position that few even at moveon.org would go along with. You promote yourself as an advocate, yet you are promoting an agenda that will bankrupt the middle class and the poor just to buy food. You offer no feasible methods of food handling, only shallow critiques to what is being done now. You don't have any ideas except a negative social engineering agenda and an insufferable arrogance. I'm not ridiculing you, by the way, just making some objective observations, you are ridiculing yourself.

[rasorinc]

In the news today.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090525...oEmjEFt4Npl88F

[Boston]

Hardly
its easier to see what you want to see than it is to change
I advocate change
fast
cause we're running out of time
fast
the longer we wait the more radical that change must be

you have not met out there if you think my views on plastics are radical
I notice you avoid the issue of overfishing, farm run off, wasteful processing practices, issues of global shipping, habitat loss, the destruction of nearly every estuary and salt marsh or the ever present extinction event that is occurring as we speak faster than at any time in the fossil record.

if you want radical I got some earth first buddies who make my views seem republican

and actually I was hoping you would at least hold up your end of the conversation with a mention of bioplastics
guess Im going to have to help you in order to keep things interesting

plastics could be replaced right now with our two most popular bio plastics
Oxo and Hydro biodegradable
and moves are being made in this direction
just not fast enough

so you see had you looked into the issue or realized the dire need for change then maybe you would have been more accepting of the up and coming solution once it reared its ugly head within the conversation
instead you insist on belittling the problem the presenter and the solution
which is a ban on plastics and its replacement with more environmentally friendly products

I hate playing devils advocate but your last had sunk far bellow a constructive level

shall we move on to the issue of overfishing

B

[Knut Sand]

Originally Posted by fasteddy106

Boston, .... etceteraetcetera......

"What gives you the right to sit in judgement from a self awarded throne",

"You don't have any ideas except a negative social engineering agenda and an insufferable arrogance".

"I'm not ridiculing you, by the way, just making some objective observations, you are ridiculing yourself".

The throne in question here is a mighty crowded place with rulerz in any direction, in case you haven't noticed already...... Boston, Mas, Meanie, JimmyBoy, even Me from time to time and now you come along crawling up on the throne here, a tiiiinnnyy 10 pointer?! you have absolutely nottin' to say...!

[Boston]

hey Knuts whats up havent seen you on in a while

Eddie
the point is that what Im talking about is exactly the direction things are taking
were it not for the death fight the plastics industry is putting up we would have seen bio-plastics a lot sooner
like 20 or so years ago
so you see all that plastic that we knew was so harmful could have been avoided and deliberately wasnt by industry protecting its profit margin
when a minor refit of machinery would have resolved the issues years ago
now
the problem has grown to stagering proportions and clean up will now cost many time what it would have had industry been a little more concerned about the rest of us

B

[Knut Sand]

Hmmm, my last post strangely wandered off course somewhat, strange, have never happened before, must be the keyboard...

Back on topic:
If the studies to be peformed now have some value in their research, it may come out what types of plastics are mostely represented here. My guess is that some sorts of plastics will be represented more than others... And if some work is put into that we may get some figures/ data on what type of plastics to put under some control. It have worked earlier with other products.

Doesn't need to be the ban of all sorts of plastic, just some control, we've done it with a few gases, and we've improved seriously with oil waste/ pollution (I do not believe that anyone have ever felt that this has caused any loss of jobs or income).

To tidy up the mess after it has become a problem doesn't seem to be a solution; many of the bigger countries have for years exported their waste to areas with less control and regulation = The ones with money and the abililty to move their litter, will (almost always) get away with dumping it somwhere else... (So the earlier the better?).

As a small start, we can start with reusing some of the zilloin (It least that's what I feel that I have under the zink) plastic bags or using a net/ bag for multiple times when we shop....

Boston; this weekend I was biking around, northern part of Denmark, beautiful landscape. I packed all the gear in plastic bags, and biking bags (used before), and stumbled upon the conclusion that sometimes plastic bags, actually, in some situations, can hold some value.... (It started to rain...heavily ). This still doesn't, In my opinion support the throwawayokay attitude that some people tend to expose.

[fasteddy106]

Knut, you've just offered a far more constructive scenario than all of Bostons posts.

But for me with this thread - - - fine sine die

[Boston]

glad you had a good time Knut
sounds like fun riding your bike through the rain
gotta admit I love rain

went to the Ho temperate rain forest a few years ago and wow
rains every day and you have to camp in hammocks hung inside of tents that are hung in the trees. Now that was some wet conditions. We had those hood things on our packs that cover your head in a little umbrella like deal. No biking and the only clear trails were generally along fallen logs. Went through socks like crazy and all the plastic bags in the world weren't going to keep you dry. It reminded me a lot of Moose Hill in western Massachusetts. Always good to hear of a weekend out hiking or biking around in the wilderness

there may be a plastics settlement in the works eventually Eddie
the thinking is that if there is a plastics settlement it might include a switch to bioplastics in most applications in return for a lower award
seems the industry could not care less about the pollution issue and is only going to be enticed by profits

my personal take on it would be to slam them with a huge settlement and let all the start up bio-plastics companies take there market share.
Degrading the environment, manipulating the market, inhibiting the development of viable solutions and refusing to assist in any clean up effort or talks is hardly behavior worthy of any reward.

there are alternatives
all we need is an business environment that allows them to be applied
and a government that is able to comprehend the severity of the problem