Henderson Island is a pacific atoll island among the Pitcairn Islands, so remote that the closest human settlement 120 miles away is where the Bounty mutineers hid out. It would seem a place where one could walk the beaches and marvel at the purity of nature, just as Darwin did close to two hundred years ago. But not so fast! Henderson Island lies uniquely at the nexus of the great swirling pacific currents. It is effectively the flushing point, the toilet, of the Earth, and as a result if you walk its should-be pristine beaches you are greeted by an incomprehensible amount of human trash. It is effectively buried in plastic.
The numbers are indeed staggering. According to Jennifer Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This was “the highest density of plastic I’ve really seen in the whole of my career.” A new study by Ms. Lavers and her colleagues published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that there were 17.6 tons of debris on the shores of the tiny island. But the most alarming aspect of this is that this amount of plastic garbage is produced by humans on the Earth every 1.98 seconds.
We should weep for Gaia. But at the same time we must do something about the uncontrolled creation and disposal of plastics and other human effluence. It is not a question of maybe but of must. It is extreme arrogance and folly to believe that we can ignore her powers, the very forces that drove evolution long before and will continue long after human existence on this planet.
“The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It’s only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little, and destroy a good bit of the population. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence.”
― Cleve Backster