Environment: Good News, Bad News

First, the good news: Vail Resorts to invest heavily in wind power, making it the second largest corporate buyer of wind power after Whole Foods Markets, which is now using 100% wind power for its energy needs.

Just outside of Palm Springs, California, you can see a huge wind farm. I don't know how to describe my feelings whenever I see it, but I personally find it to be beautiful. Hundreds and hundreds of quiet, simple, windmills. They're all lined up like a marching band formation. I find them to be elegant. And it is a renewable energy source, doesn't create greenhouse gasses, it is our friend.


And the bad news:

Plague of plastic chokes the seas, causing the death of at least 40% of Albatross chicks on Midway Island Atoll. Chicks die with a belly full of bottle caps, combs, cigarette lighters, golf tees. John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist who is stationed at the atoll for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We often find cigarette lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, toy soldiers — anything made out of plastic."

Midway Island Atoll is 1000 miles from the nearest city; it is midway between the USA and Japan, and is without any industry, no fast-food establishments, no overflowing trashcans, and only a handful of people. Yet the deaths of these magnificent birds is a clear indicator of the massive amounts of crap that clogs the seas.

Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their young. Their flight paths from Midway often take them over what is perhaps the world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas.

This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part of a system of currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Located halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an area of slack winds and sluggish currents where flotsam collects from around the Pacific, much like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot tub.

Nearly 90% of this crap is plastic. Most of it comes from land, litter tossed out on highways, streets, streams, rivers which gets swept out to sea. The rest is dumped from ships - both passenger and cargo ships. Some consists of synthetic floats and other gear that is jettisoned illegally to avoid the cost of proper disposal in port.

In addition, thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy seas each year, spilling their contents. One ship heading from Los Angeles to Tacoma, Wash., disgorged 33,000 blue-and-white Nike basketball shoes in 2002. Other loads lost at sea include 34,000 hockey gloves and 29,000 yellow rubber ducks and other bathtub toys.

This crap floats around in various gyres for dozens of years, eventually finding its way to various currents, and spreading out across the seas. The victims - sea birds, seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, fish - mistake it for food, and die. Since the 1950s, the plastic debris has increased 10-fold each decade.

Plastic doesn't disintigrate. And plastic is derived from petroleum. And petroleum is a huge contributor to greenhouse gasses.

But WINDFARMS are a non-polluting, renewable resource that don't kill sea life or choke our oceans.