No fewer than five stories recently made news headlines, one after another.

The remote Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at a faster rate than even the most pessimistic scientific projections suggested it would.

Another pipeline leak, this one in a remote northwestern corner of the Canadian province Alberta, proves Big Oil still hasn’t mastered the technology of constructing a pipeline that won’t leak — despite the oil lobby’s defensive, relentless and increasingly shrill claims to the contrary.

The self-explanatory “Garbage Patch” floating and bobbing in the north-central Pacific is now the size of France. The country, that is, not the town in Kansas.

The United Nations reports that, in Asia, there will be “no exploitable fish stocks” — no wild fish, in other words — by 2048. With the world's already overstretched population growing every day and food insecurity a growing concern, many marine biologists warn we could run out of wild fish in our lifetimes.

But wait, you say, surely “sustainable seafood farms” will make up the difference.

Well, they would — if only, as the salmon farming fishery off Canada’s west coast keeps showing, they weren’t constantly leaking biotoxins into already threatened coastal waters.

Piscine reovirus, aka PRV, causes heart and skeletal muscular inflammation, aka HSMI; recent research suggests that PRV cause the disease HSMI, as evidenced by mortality rates of up to 20% in salmon farms in Norway. PRV in turn affects migrating wild salmon, owing to the effluent from processing plants and farm hatcheries. This is not rocket science, as Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) senior veterinarian Dr. Ian Keith told a colleague in an email, as reported earlier this year by the Canadian news site The Tyee.ca: “This is 19th century thinking.” https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/01/11/DFO-Gut-Rules-Protecting-Wild-Salmon/

Melting glaciers, leaking pipelines, a growing garbage problem, drained fish stocks and a worrying over-reliance on artificially processed food naturally made me think of Soylent Green.

Soylent Green was a 1973 post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson (in his final film role) set in an overcrowded, smog-choked cityscape in the not-too-distant future, where people are reduced to eating tasteless, protein crackers — ostensibly made from “high-energy plankton” — are doled out in tightly controlled rations by an all-powerful conglomerate called the Soylent Corporation. Soylent Green was loosely adapted from futurist Harry Harrison’s 1968 novel Make Room! Make Room! that posited a world in which overcrowding, pollution, global warming and rampant industrialization have created a society in which homeless people fill the streets and those with jobs are barely scraping by.

Soylent Green was no Star Wars. It won a smattering of boutique, sci-fi film awards, but it wasn’t exactly a hit with audiences, not in a year when The Sting, American Graffiti and The Way We Were topped the box-office charts. Critics’ reviews were mixed. Time’s Jay Cocks called it “intermittently interesting,” adding that the film, will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson.” The New York Times’s A.H. Weller found that Soylent Green “projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man’s seemingly witless destruction of the Earth’s resources.”

Some 45 years later, Soylent Green is not remembered as a great movie — truthfully, it was never that — or as Edward G. Robinson’s farewell performance, but rather as an eerily prescient vision of a hellish future that now seems more like cautionary news documentary than science-fiction.

It’s hard not to respect a film that, in 1973, had Robinson’s angry, aging character Sol Roth rage against the dying of the light, saying things like, “You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal life.

“Why, in my day, you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs, they had, Real butter. Fresh lettuce.”

And fresh salmon. Not the farmed kind.

“There was a world once, you punk,” Sol Roth told Charlton Heston’s detective character, Frank Thorn.

“Yes,” Thorn replied, “so you keep telling me.”

“I was there,” Roth said. “I can prove it.”

“I know, I know. When you were young, people were better.”

“No. People were always rotten. But the world was beautiful.”

It was. It still is. Time to wake up.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-doomsday-glacier-w481260

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061102-seafood-threat.html

http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/fraser_sockeye_vs_farmed_/

News flash — though hardly a surprise. The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is much more extensive than previously thought — bigger, wider and choked with fishing nets, plastic containers and the detritus of human consumption on an unimaginable scale, a scale not even the most pessimistic of scientific projections predicted.

The discovery, if it can be called that, has touched off an End-of-Days debate: Garbage waste and the degradation of the environment may be an even more pressing concern to humanity than climate change.

Given the recent alarm over climate change — among those who read and follow the news, anyway — that’s saying a lot.

The extent of the garbage patch was first projected in 2014, when a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft — funded by The Ocean Cleanup, an NGO sponsored in part by the Dutch government — did a fly-past over the central core of the patch, the garbage-patch equivalent of the eye of a hurricane, where the most intense winds are concentrated.

©NOAA/US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Here are the numbers. The core of the garbage patch covers some 1.6 million square kilometres (618,0000 sq miles), more than twice the size of France.

As with the man-made Great Wall of China, the not-so-great man-made Great Pacific Garbage Patch is said to be seen from space, though at least one recent report — on National Geographic’s website — disputes that.

And while that same report says most of the patch is discarded fishing gear, not discarded bottles and straws, there’s little doubting that plastics — convenient, relatively inexpensive to produce and durable to a fault — are at the centre of the increasingly urgent debate over environmental sustainability.

According to the most conservative estimates from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in our oceans. By 2014, four years ago, more than 311 million tons of plastic were produced around the globe, a 20-fold increase over 1964.

With plastic being an indelible part of our day-to-day lives, it follows that much more plastic is being produced today. According to research published recently in Scientific Reports, at least 79,000 tons of that plastic is floating in the sprawling patch of detritus. Around 8 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year, where it washes up on beaches or drifts out to sea.

This matters because “the large stuff” — loosely defined as any discarded plastic-based item larger than half-a-metre in size — will, over time, decompose into microplastics, which as we now know, are impossible to get rid of and can turn up anywhere, from the fish we eat to the bottled water we drink.

It’s a matter of debate, too, what effect microplastics are having on the food chain. Not enough time has gone by for scientists to pin down exactly what’s happening and why, let alone how to fix it. Large pieces of plastic break down very slowly, over hundreds of years.

Separate papers by UNEP and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation predict there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans by 2050.

Recent trends in scientific studies show that, if anything, predictions tend to be underestimated rather than overestimated. The world’s polar ice caps are melting at a faster rate than scientists initially projected; rising seas, once considered a problem that future generations would have to face, are instead becoming a problem now, in low-lying land masses like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, and are believed to be the cause of much of the world’s wild, unpredictable shifts in weather.

(The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, for those not in the know, is a UK registered charity, founded in 2009, dedicated to inspiring a generation to rethink, redesign and build a better future through the framework of a sustainable, “circular economy,” a future without waste, in which business, the environment and resources work together, where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, where manufacturing cycles are deliberately aligned, and where what we perceive to be “waste” — junk, refuse, damaged goods and unwanted products — is instead used, “repurposed” if you like, as raw material for a new production cycle, thus feeding into the so-called “circular economy.”)

What can be done?

The Ocean Cleanup has vowed to take a “moonshot” effort to clean up half the Great Pacific garbage patch within five years, starting this summer, by mopping up the rubbish using a system of large floating barriers with underwater screens that capture and concentrate plastic into a confined area, which can then be scooped out of the ocean. In theory.

A prototype will be launched this summer in San Francisco. The prototype is designed to collect five tons of waste a month. If successful, it will be fellowed by dozens of other specially designed booms, measuring up to 2 km (1.2 miles) in length.

The moonshot comes with caveats, of course. The system is not designed to catch microplastics — defined as any item measuring less than 10 millimetres (0.39 inches) — which, recent studies are now suggesting, could prove to be the more long-term problem, and the harder of the two to get a handle on.

There’s an urgent need to get in there quickly and clean it up, though the easier solution is to ensure it doesn’t get into the ocean in the first place.

Many countries are already onboard, kin principle if not in practice. Nearly 200 countries signed onto a UN resolution in 2017 intended to slow the deluge of plastic being dumped into the world’s oceans. The resolution has no stated timetable, however, and is not legally binding.

Anyone and everyone can make a start, though, by turning away from single-use plastic, whether it6’s cutlery, straws or plastic bottles that, for whatever reason, can’t be recycled.

“One of the easiest steps is changing the way we use and discard plastic products,” California-based marine ecologist Dr. Clare Steele told The Guardian’s Oliver MIlman, only last week. Common sense, in other words.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen