The grocery clerk was ill prepared for Singlebarbed repartee, he’d asked whether I wanted “paper or plastic,” and I’d responded, ” choose between a Pterodactyl or a pine tree? You pick, let the guilt be on your conscience.. ”

From now on I’ll be much gentler, he still percolates his coffee, mine has the bark on..

I’ll decimate Pine trees until something worse happens. Reading an article on the North Pacific Gyre, aided my resolve to get all my groceries in paper. Even a hardened fisherman can have a twinge of conscience as we’ve done it to ourselves. The “Gyre” is roughly the “center” of the Pacific Ocean, bounded by Asia, Australia, and North America, that serves as an airless meeting point for the coastal currents. It’s the Elephant Graveyard of Plastic, a soup of castoff consumer plastics the size of Texas.

Traditional plastics don’t degrade, they just get brittle – and over time the ocean is filled with tiny plastic fragments that linger on the surface, brightly colored bits of debris that lure birds and fish into feeding on them.

It’s pretty damn disgusting to contemplate, eyewitness accounts describe, “a half mile of Taco Bell wrappers” they had to sail through. Most of the debris is washed into the ocean via normal winter rains, it’s not simply a case of wanton garbage disposal, more of a phenomenon induced by the longevity of the material. “Every piece of plastic ever made is still here..”

Revenge of the Pterodactyl, I’ll take my chances with the Pine tree..

(YouTube video available here)

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