Dump the plastic, save the sea

It's called The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it may be the most disgusting object ever born of man. Twice the size of the continental United States or merely Texas — it's difficult to measure — it drifts 900 kilometres off the California coast, a full 100 million tonnes of discarded plastic. Over the next decade, it is predicted that its size will double.

Need more horror? It is 30 metres deep. There are two bulbous slidey linked islands of it, floating on either side of Hawaii. I say "it" because it is a new substance for scientists to categorize. You'd think it would be like at the beach, a lot of floating stuff that forms a kind of unreliable ice floe.

No. The best word the scientists can come up with is "soup." It is translucent and swirls just beneath the surface of the North Pacific gyre current, a kind of quiet vortex in the ocean that gave every plastic thing you and I have thrown away over our lifetimes a chance to meet and greet. And stew. When it "barfs," Hawaiian beaches are covered.

Soup du jour

The soup today?

It's water bottles, rubber ducks, carrier bags, beach balls, milk/dry cleaning/carrier/wardrobe/garbage bags, fridge doors, water guns, sneakers, cups, lids, blue boxes, green bins, photo frames, DVD cases, LPs, CDs and their wrap, barbecue covers, loungers, deck tables and chairs, car interiors, buckets, toothbrushes, baby bottles made with bisphenol A, shampoo bottles, detergent jugs, flowers, milk crates, carpeting, Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo bottles, dolls, wading pools, hair dryers, closet organizers, Swiffers, sinks, humidifiers, air cleaners, air conditioners, fridge liners, ab rollers, Happy Meal toys, restaurant trays, shower caps, beer coolers, pink flamingoes, shower curtains, Christo's polypropylene art wraps, Astroturf, tampon applicators, Plexiglas police shields, Lego, bullets, hula hoops, Velcro, Silly Putty, zippers, car bumpers, Formica, Saran wrap, wallpaper, Tupperware, the polyester crimplene pantsuit I sewed in 1972, Teflon pans, acrylic poster glass, pantyhose, rayon shirts, pens, celluloid film, computers, baby bottles, cutlery, Frisbees, hair rollers, Styrofoam containers, catheters, polar fleece, Gore-Tex jackets, piano keys, jellies and Crocs, resin garden pots, galoshes, shoelace aglets (tips), stir sticks, helmets, contact lenses, electronic equipment casing, Silastic for gaskets and breast implants, garden hoses, sex toys, credit cards, banding wrap for corpses, expandable insulation, cigarette lighters, sprinklers, prosthetic limbs, window frames, eyeglasses and all manner of piping.

In other words, it's the story of our lives and I shall not descend into bitterness but would the world not have chugged along just as easily if they had been made of wood, minerals, plants, rock, clay, silk and glass? Eventually, these things crumble obediently into the soil.

Not so plastic. It doesn't biodegrade, it photodegrades, which means it just breaks into smaller pieces, not into components. Microscopic pellets of plastic in the billions — you just knew they'd be called "nurdles" and they are — make their way into the oceans where they soak up toxins and are absorbed by sea jellies. The food chain does its thing, from jelly to fish to big fish to our plates, and we are now ingesting toxic mermaid's tears.

Plastic on your plate

When online commentator Mark Morford wrote about this pulsing seaborne plastic kinetic clot last fall, I swear I thought he was joking. He says that we might as well sit down at dinner and eat plastic bottles instead of the fish that took in nurdles. Saves time. Everything bites us in the ass, as he would say in that slangy American style that I love, partly because as the planet deteriorates, only the baroque Yank argot will do the trick.

The United Nations Environment Program says that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. According to Greenpeace, about 10% of the 200 billion pounds of plastic humans make each year ends up in the ocean. Some of the great Pacific floating landfill comes from oil platforms, spilled sea containers and cruise ships but 90% of it comes from land and it began 50 years ago, before many of us were born. Not that we don't all, every one of us, buy, fondle, squeeze, store, sit on and decorate with plastic.

Don't make me hit you with another list.

Think of it, this huge creature, the cheap mod Disney replacement for the melting glaciers. It's like a modern version of the primordial ooze out of which we emerged. Imagine sailing into it and being dropped into its depths. I'd say we'd die wriggling with horror and screaming for air or even water in our lungs, instead of this discharge. But a version of this death will happen to us anyway and we won't have to head for the South Pacific to do it.

We have the foul pollution in our air and water, in the dirt that grows our crops that feed the animals that we eat. It is soaked in our environment and in the economic and political systems we humans built and what's done is done.

Disrespectful, logical, right

I have always been slightly snarky about hardline environmentalists because ultimately, I know they want me dead and I don't wish to oblige them.

When we are dead (preferably unembalmed, coffinless and left to rot normally in a shallow grave), we will not be buying plastic goods and tossing them away. But I can't blame environmentalists for disrespectful logic. They're right.

And even if they're not right and we all — and we will — claw and scrabble for the longest, most luxurious, meat-oriented, drug-enhanced, currency-blowing 90 years that we can squeeze out of North America, we little Richie Riches will face the consequences.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is going to bite us. It's the mistress phoning us at home, the excess of E in the Eighties cancelling a chunk of our brain as we age, it's Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, it's I Know What You Did Last Summer, it is reaping what you sow.

Your payback is a hideous chyme stretching and pulsing in the sea like an underwater gob of spiky phlegm. Hey, I never even went to the West Coast, you say. But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will get your kids and your grandkids.

The Blob was the dumbest horror movie ever made. Naturally it was the one that came true.

This Week

Girls Like Us is the biography of three women who, if we only knew it, probably decided if we'd have sex tonight, and with whom and on what terms. It's 2008 but Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon hit a wave in the late '60s and early '70s, and they changed relations between men and women. Young women readers, listen up. Joni Mitchell's strait-laced admirable Prairie housewife mother vacuumed her garage every day. That's what one of the greatest artists of our era escaped. Carole King had to marry Gerry Goffin, a total bastard, because she was pregnant. He hit her. Most of her husbands did. She wrote It's Too Late for the Tapestry album. Listen to it, young women, and think of that. Carly Simon, so sexy that a picture of her Playing Possum album cover hangs on my office wall (this was pre-Madonna), has never been with a man who didn't resent her sexual and economic power. Sheila Weller, a workmanlike biographer I have always liked, has told the stories of three artists who broke every rule and paid heavily for it. That's what happens to women who rebel.

In 1974, Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde starred in the S&M Nazi love story The Night Porter. I finally got around to watching it. What a dreary plod, Rampling and Bogarde rattling their chains as they crawl around the kitchen arguing about groceries.