Of all the Earth's features, our oceans might have the least noticed but biggest impact on human life.  In the uppermost layers, tiny one-celled Phytoplankton serve as the foundation for all marine life by converting CO2 and sunlight into food which feeds tiny sea creatures, smaller fish, bigger fish, and so on up the chain.  On land trees and green plants produce half the worlds oxygen.  The other half comes from phytoplankton.  So small they're impossible to see without a microscope, human life on earth would be vastly different, if not impossible without the ocean's tiny floating food and oxygen factories.

Rising sea surface temperatures mean more than stronger hurricanes and storms.  Since Phytoplankton depends on cooler, nutrient rich water to feed, temperature variations outside their normal range threaten not only the ocean's primary food source, but also our greatest source of atmospheric oxygen.

In the United States alone, a three foot rise in sea levels would result in more than 500 billion dollars in property damage.  Worldwide, an estimated 634 million people live in low lying coastal areas.   Consider that the world's largest ice caps - Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet - are melting at the fastest rates ever recorded.  Where do we put even a hundred million displaced people once their homes and farms are flooded? Rising sea levels and surface temperatures present not only an environmental crisis, but also a potential humanitarian emergency of staggering scope.

                  Floating plastic

There are vast areas of the world's oceans where the surface is choked with plastic from horizon to horizon.  The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is an area twice the size of Texas that has literally become a graveyard for the scattered castoffs and debris of our industrial civilization.  We may have tossed a plastic bottle into a gutter or let a Styrofoam cup get away from us at the beach.  A container of polyethylene pellets bound for a toy factory in China might have fallen overboard during a storm.  However it gets to the ocean, it all eventually ends up in areas like the NPSG, where the wind and currents move slowly, and where there are six times more plastic than phytoplankton per unit of water.  Of the 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year about 10 percent ends up floating in the ocean, where it will not biodegrade.  At best, it may become brittle in the sun and disintegrate into fragments.  But to birds, fish, and sea turtles, tiny bits of plastic look like fish eggs.  If the plastic doesn't poison them first it clogs their digestive tract, starving them to death.  And almost all the plastic ever made still exists because we've spent millions on chemical research ensuring it has the properties we demand.  10,000 years from now it will still be around.  Even fragmented down to molecular level it will retain the properties that have made it an indispensable part of our modern life, but also make it a dire threat to the health of our oceans and ultimately ourselves.

What we can do

Faced with such huge and heartbreaking problems, it's easy to feel powerless, like anything an individual might do to help is a drop in the vast ocean.  Fortunately, the truth is far brighter than this.  Understand that none of us are alone in wanting to help.  Every day the environmental movement grows and every day more people choose to make wise decisions about how they live and interact with the natural world.  It's only one drop in the ocean if we isolate ourselves and keep quiet.

Speak up and ask for corn and starch based plastics at your coffeehouse or deli.  Write your leaders and let them know that the billions of dollars in worldwide fishing industry subsidies each year support environmentally destructive practices.  Next time you're in the mood for seafood, take a minute to do some research.  Ask your grocer or chef for seafood from sustainable fisheries, like farm raised Tilapia, or wild Alaskan salmon and King crab.

Visit our projects and find out how you can get involved in creating a cleaner world today!