Plastic emotions

PADDLER'S PLANET by CHRISTIAN WAGLEY

ThePADDLER 4

Plastic emotions
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We are emotional creatures. Our emotions allow us to care
about our fellow humans, and the health of our planet.This
appears to be an evolutionary response that allowed us to
quickly assess threats and to give empathy and care to those in need, giving
us a survival advantage over humans without such care.
But those same emotions routinely steer
us wrong. In deciding on threats to our
natural environment, we tend to focus
on the most tangible over the most
meaningful and the most visible over the
most impactful.This is certainly the case
with the issue of plastic in the oceans,
which gets an emotional response far
beyond what it deserves.
Images of plastic bottles and bags bobbing on
the sea and washing down storm drains create
an ugly scene. Even uglier are those images of a
sea turtle stomach clogged by a plastic bag, or
tiny bits of plastic pulled from the gut of a fish.
These clearly are awful reflections of our
consumer culture.
And so many of us click on these images on
Facebook, share them around, and make angry
comments about the use of plastic.That's
because plastic in our waterways is a visceral,
emotional issue that evokes a hugely emotional
response. While it is a real issue deserving of
attention, it's also vastly overstated as a problem
when compared to so many others impacting
our oceans, and may even be serving as a
convenient 'out' for people unwilling to address
the real environmental issues of our time.

The big issues affecting our waterways are water
pollution from farms and urban runoff,
overfishing, and climate change.The difficulty is
that these issues are largely invisible to the public.
The biggest forms of water pollution come from
excess nutrients and chemical contaminants such
as mercury from the burning of fossil fuels, but
neither of these can easily be seen. We don't see
what happens on fishing boats and even when
we do it doesn't look so bad.
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil
fuels is shifting species ranges, decreasing oxygen
levels in the water and causing ocean acidification
that is killing shellfish and corals.The impacts of
fossil fuels are probably the biggest of all, as they
are also responsible for chemical and nutrient
contamination such as the presence of
hydrocarbons that foul urban waterways around
the world. But these impacts are largely invisible
to the average person.
I've also noticed among my friends that many
of those who make the angriest statements
about plastic, are often those unwilling to make
the larger changes in their own lives. I once
spoke to the environmental committee of a
group in my community, urging them to take
action to help create communities that were

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