In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremelypowerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also theplankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
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I have received permission to reproduce this article, here on my blog with the following conditions.
Hello! You are free to repost the text as long as you give attribution, do not alter the original text, mention where it was originally published, and include a link to the original post. You must also allow others to do the same (you cannot claim a copyright of the reposting). You are also free to quote, extract, mention, etc.
You are also more that welcome to embed the video. Thank you for asking, and thank you so much for helping us spread this message!
You my dear readers may do the same. Please lets see if we can get this message out to as many people as we possibly can. I know that I can’t stop the polar ice caps from melting but I can drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I and my family use.
I am a regular reader of the Tasmanian Times. Sometimes the reading is difficult. I have lifted this with permission straight from the Tasmanian times.
He was poisoning the water when he chanced upon a slaughter
So he joined in patriotically to massacre and rape
And he sees the vision splendid of the native problem ended
And a land made safe for cattle from Tasmania to the Cape
In my genocidal fancy visions come to me of Clancy
With a gin across his saddle and her children in pursuit;
As he leaves behind their crying he tots up the dead and dying
And he calculates his bounty and gets ready for a root.
With commendable persistence Clancy follows the resistance
And you’ll find him the rearguard with the priests and their Te
Deums.
While the troopers do the shooting Clancy rides behind them,
looting;
There’s tjuringas for collectors and some heads for the museums.
And when he meets a Jack, Clancy sometimes offers baccy,
And many other presents to improve the shining hour.
While his cobbers call him silly, he smiles and boils his billy
For there’s measles in the blanket rolls and strychnine in the flour.
And a firm but friendly parson thinks he’ll try a little arson
To exorcise the dreaming with his candle, book and bell;
His redeemer loudly praising, he sets all the gunyahs blazing
To civilise the heathen with a touch of Christian hell.
As he contemplates the scene he can remember Truganini
And Pemulwuy and Banelon and others of their kind
And on gentle summer breezes he can sense the new diseases
That will carry their descendants out of sight and out of mind.
And the sturdy stockhorse whinnies as he tramples piccaninnies
And the rider cracks his stockwhip at the ones who run away
And above the odd death rattle he can hear the lowing cattle
As the drover brings them into camp to end a perfect day.
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“Rudd would also acknowledge that there was another side to Clancy which Paterson does not mention. In spite of the poets assertion that no blood was shed in the pioneering days, actually quite a lot was; it’s just that very little of it was white man’s blood. For Paterson, Indigenous Australians were barely perceptible; if seen at all, they were lovable clowns, figures of fun, not part of the real narrative.”
I have finally decided on the spot for Mum’s garden. I had to think about it a lot before I was happy with the position.
The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.
Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.
I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.
The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.
It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.
The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.
But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.
Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.
This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.
This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.
The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.
It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.
Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.
So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.
If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.
This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.
And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..
I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.
The first sentence of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the whole piece of writing that follows. This is even more true for a blog post where lots of people don’t actually read the whole post. The opening and closing sentences give the skimmers a point of reference to frame their questions or comments.
Sometimes I will sit here and the words just spill out onto the page faster than I can type them. The piece of writing takes on a small life of its own and all the words fit together nicely.
Other times I will be interrupted and lose my train of thought so many times that, I either just give up and save the piece to my drafts folder or I struggle along clumsily, placing all the wrong words in a crooked line.
Often I will read something my daughter has written and the powerful beauty of her words will take my breath away. I will start to cry as I nod yes to her words, and then withher pain ringing in my ears I end up here trying to articulate my own.
Veronica will be 21 on Thursday. Veronica’s 21st birthday was the milestone that Mum was aiming for. I am struggling to contain my bitterness that we lost Mum to a cancer she should never have had. I am so sad for Veronica that her birthday will be such a difficult day without Mum.
Normally we would have planned a celebration. There would have been lots of food and music, laughter and joy. Now there is only sadness and ashes.I am bitter that the joy has been stolen from my child.
Veronica and I are going out for lunch to our favourite Japanese restaurant tomorrow, just us two together.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day (11 November) marks the anniversary of the armistice which ended the First World War (1914–18). Each year Australians observe one minute silence at 11 am on 11 November, in memory of those who died or suffered in all wars and armed conflicts.
I accepted an offer for mum’s house on Thursday and all my words have vanished again.
When I was trying to decide whether or not to accept the offer, I rang my daughter to see what she thought. Together we decided to sell the house. We two alone, where once it had been we three together.
The circle is broken. I have lost my words.
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In one of life’s lucky coincidences Chris Jordan is giving a lecture in Hobart on Tuesday evening. The lecture is titled “Wasting Away” and he will be talking about the massive waste generated by our throw away society as well as showing the photographs of the albatrosses. For anyone interested out there the lecture is 5.45 – 7 pm at the Stanley Burbury theatre at the uni campus in Sandy Bay.
God is now following me on twitter. Great. Thanks to the evil Sister Paschal and her cane of doom, it has taken me years to shake the spooky sensation that God is watching me and there he is on bloody twitter.Stalking me just like the bloody nun’s said he would. Gah.
The invitations for the exhibition have been printed and I will be posting them off this week. That is my plate in the bottom left hand corner.
I will be back later when I have found my words again.
