green is universal

It's Not All Doom and Gloom... Unless You're a Plankton

Posted at 11:16 AM on January 16, 2008 comments (0)

By Siobhan Adcock, iVillage.com

I just finished a wonderful book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Since then, I have been dorking out to basically anyone who'll indulge me, trying to teach people some of the (many) things I learned by reading it. Did you know there's a huge swirling trash dump floating in the middle of the Pacific that's bigger than Texas? Did you know that we sent Chuck Berry songs into space to represent us to alien civilizations? Did you know there's forest primeval in the Bronx, but it's being basically sterilized by Bronx squirrels?

What I found most wonderful about Weisman's book, though, is its optimism. Even though our planet's overall health is, as we know, not good (and this book provides some jaw-droppingly clear examples of just how not-good that I'd never heard before), Weisman's writing and research makes clear just how resilient nature truly is. If and when we humans destroy ourselves, our planet will probably bounce back. I found that message to be oddly, counterintuitively reassuring.

Until I read about the plankton.

Just as plastic six-pack rings strangle sea otters, abandoned commercial fishing lines snare whales, and plastic bags suffocate sea turtles, on a smaller level, all the microscopic pieces of plastic that have been swept into the ocean are giving plankton, well, fatal constipation.

And it's all my fault. Okay, partly.

Apparently, two major sources of microscopic plastics in ocean water are 1.) plastic that's already washed out to sea, degrading into smaller and smaller bits like rock erodes into sand. And - this is the one that got me - 2.) exfoliating body scrubs, which are essentially made of thousands of tiny, unfilterable plastic beads that wash right into our water supply. Plankton apparently eat the "microbeads" in our body scrubs because they're the size of food, and then die of eating plastic.

Bad news, right? So I just squirted a whole bottle of Neutrogena into my trash in horror. And I switched to scrubs that contain ground-up nuts, salt, or sugar instead of plastic microbeads. Because sure, I like having decent-looking skin. But we humans are going to be around for a while longer, and I'm pulling for our planet. And I'm especially pulling for the plankton.

Siobhan Adcock
iVillage, Senior Producer - Network & Social Media
http://www.iVillage.com