Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Plastic bag trees.



With the coming of fall the trees at the front of my building slowly loose their leaves. Strangely enough once they loose their leaves they start to grow plastic bags. They don't grow a lot of bags and they some times fall off, but there always seems to be at least one bag out there. I recently watched a short documentary about a pollution study in the Arctic. It would appear as though our garbage is finding its way into the Arctic eco-system. Polar bears, seals and Inuit were found to have high levels of mercury in their blood, as well as other toxic chemicals. The question raised by the study was, how did these pollutants get there? The study concluded that they were carried there by the wind currents. Mercury, expelled from the burning of fossil fuels, was carried along with other pollutants into the upper atmosphere and then transported along by wind currents until it “fell” to Earth. Not only are pollutants carried around the world in this manner, garbage is also blown aloft by powerfull wind currents. What we do to damage the environment here in the name of progress is destroying the environment of the polar bear, seal and Inuit thousands of kilometres from the source.
Is one of these plastic bags on its way to the North Pole?