The Hottest Pepper Blog

Aloha Friends,

I hope everyone is having a great summer!  I have been preparing a blog about something that is very disturbing and something that we cannot make go away.   Since I am a surfer and a lover of the ocean (where we derive more than 70% of our oxygen) and want to preserve this for our kids, I need to get this story out now.  I will finish my blog with all of the facts and a bit of history, but that will be later.

There is a huge amount of photo-degraded plastic in the Pacific Ocean (google Pacific Garbage Patch) about 800 miles from Hawaii that is about the size of Texas.  It is more than 30 feet thick and has a density that is 6 times greater than plankton.  It comes mostly from our landfills and is conprised of just about anything plastic–bottles, razors, baggies, toys, utensils, etc.  There are currents that take it to this area and it just sits there and screws things up.  More than 100,000 sea birds die per year by ingesting this trash, and more than 10,000 marine mammals such as sea turtles die because of our total disregard for the earth.

Can we clean it up?  NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.  Where would you put it?  There is not a place on this Earth that could hold it.  AND we keep adding to it by leaps and bounds.  Next time you go out to eat at a fast food restaurant, Starbucks or similar, notice that they use plastic utensils.  What happens when the client is finished…  Do they take the utensils home and recycle?  No, just a one time thing, throw it away. Next!  What about plastic bags, baggies, bread wrappers, shopping bags, and so on… Most end up in our oceans and sooner or later, it’s going to kill us.  I recycle everything many times and if I eat at Chipotles (about the only fast foot I will eat) I take the plastic utensils home and use them again, and again, and again.  I reuse my baggies 25 times each, not because I am cheap, but because I don’t want to choke our oceans, I don’t want to cut off our main supplier of oxygen and because I want this planet to last.  Many cities have banned the use of plastic bags and many more are in that process.  This doesn’t go far enough.  The bottom line is that this is a world wide problem and we have to do something about it.  Don’t just sit idle, talk about it with your friends and make a conscious effort to recycle. Write your elected representatives, and demand only containers that can be recycled.  We are fighting big business on this one, and they don’t want to change.  They will rape and pillage the earth until there is nothing left.  But we have to get them to change by changing ourselves, our habit patterns and cut them off at the knees.   If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem…

AND, scientists theorize that there is a garbage patch in the South Pacific that is even larger than this one.  Everyone wants “the American lifestyle”.  Well this lifestyle of careless abandon, and waste is eventually going to kill us.  Let us all make a conscious effort to do better and think about the long term ramifications of this behavior.

Jamie