Under The Bridge

I spent this past weekend in Seattle and Vancouver. Originally, I was going for no good reason, just because I wanted to go to a party at the Pacific Science Center on Saturday night and to visit a friend (TProphet) in Seattle. I know, that’s a unique name – but it's a long story.

A couple weeks ago, he emailed me and said that as long as I was coming out for Saturday night, I might as well DJ somewhere on Friday night. Since he is a Seattle promoter and has a full sound system of his own, he said he was going to set up an event for me. I said that I’d definitely be willing to play if he got anything together, and I asked where I might be playing. He said, “oh, maybe under an abandoned bridge.” Hm.

I got to Seattle on Thursday evening and we spent most of the night getting things organized, and doing a little bit of touristy stuff. Then, on Friday, we started getting ready for the bridge party. I won’t lie, I expected something pretty low key - maybe a pair of speakers, a dozen people, and the chance to annoy or entertain some homeless people, or to get into a fight with bikers. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The party that he and his friends pulled off was one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve ever had. After we convinced the K-9 unit at 10:30pm that the entire cube van full of sound gear we were loading up wasn’t stolen, and said that we were preparing for a nice responsible folk music concert, we hit the road. Upon arriving at the bridge, there was a flurry of action, and within about half an hour we had two full sound stages set up with power generators, propane heaters for the crowd, a small kitchen selling drinks and snacks, and an art display/sale. The equipment and sound system was better than what I’ve played on in a lot of clubs in Atlantic Canada (five bass bins for my stage alone). A couple hundred people showed up, even though it was a totally unadvertised renegade party. It was pouring all night, but we were completely dry under the bridge. With two stages, and a total of ten DJ’s playing throughout the evening, Friday night alone was worth the trip.





On Saturday, TProphet’s sound system was being used at the main stage of the party of the Pacific Science Center, so he went off to set that up while I went exploring the Seattle social scene for several hours with a couple of his friends. One of his friends in particular was quite entertaining. TProphet introduced him by saying, “this is possibly the sketchiest guy you’ll ever meet, but I mean that in a good way. Try not to end up in jail before the show.” This person, who I will leave unnamed, was quite entertaining. He was discussing his plan to take out a life insurance policy on himself, fly to Zambia to buy a death certificate in the black market, then buy a Zambian identity and passport in the black market, then come back to the States as a different person and cash in on his own life insurance policy, and then use the proceeds to tour the world as a Zambian. Or something like that. Anyway, it was an entertaining start to the evening.

When we got to the Pacific Science Center, I was extremely impressed, once again. They had a full blown party IN the Science Center. There were four stages with DJ’s from 10pm-4am, three or four full bars, and best of all, all of the exhibits were open. I had a few drinks and went straight to the planetarium, where I spent the next hour and a half looking at the stars. The butterfly exhibits were open, and there was a bar in the dinosaur room, and basically the whole place was interesting. The best thing was that the tickets were moderately expensive, which meant that there weren’t a lot of street kids, so it was a very clean and respectful crowd. This, of course, is good when you have several thousand people partying in a museum.





Seattle now ranks near the very top of my list of fun cities to visit. Click here to see more photos from the trip.

911 System in Action

We have a custodian at the MTA Pub named Joann. She's worked for us for about a decade, and does an amazing job of keeping the floors and washrooms clean.

This morning, she was hard at work, and was wiping down one of the phones in the building. Six minutes later, the RCMP stormed the University Centre, to make sure she was OK. Apparently, while wiping off the phone, she unknowingly dialed 911.

She was pretty embarrassed, but it's good to know that the system can function effectively for emergencies!

Naming Songs

I'm just going through the latest Richmond Record Pool DVD, and I'm getting a bit annoyed at the way some record companies promote themselves. Let me cut right to the chase. If you're going to name a song, use the following format:

        Artist - Song Name (Specific Remix).mp3

It is not that hard. Now I can understand someone coming up with a somewhat unconventional naming protocol if you're maybe playing around with something, or naming stuff in a hurry, or drunk. But if you're a Record Company, you need to pay attention to a simple concept. It's called MARKETING.

Let me give you an example of a "bad" job of naming a track. This is an actual example from the DVD that I'm reviewing this evening:

        drop_54_b1be_bop_DOWNLOAD.mp3

WTF? This is just ridiculous. Who is the artist? What is the track called? Why is "download" in capital letters, and what does it mean, since it's from a physical DVD? Now to assauge your curiousity, I spent a few minutes trying to puzzle it out, and the only thing I can figure out so far is that it is probably the 54th release on the Drop Records label, side B1, and the song is probably called "Be-Bop." But to be honest, after I got that far, and couldn't assign any degree of certainty to that guess, I dragged that puppy right over to the Recycle Bin (where it will not be recycled).

I'm sure there are DJ's out there who like to spend their time checking out mysterious, nebulous tracks. There is certainly a subtle appeal to a "white label" track for some DJ's. However, if I'm personally trying to quickly sort through and review 250 songs in an evening, you've just lost all hope of getting any air time from me if you don't name the song properly.

On a positive note, I'm glad to see more people starting to trade and distribute WAV files instead of 320 kbps mp3's. With the way hard drives are growing these days, it's worth the extra storage space to improve the audio quality.

Cambridge Punk Rock Show

I flew out to Vancouver last night. I’m here to do some work on “When I Grow Old,” a track I’m recording with Mike Allison, at FaderMaster Studios. One of the sound engineers and owners at FaderMaster is Shawn Cole, an old friend and roommate, who is now teaching at the Pacific Audio Visual Institute in Vancouver, helping to run FaderMaster, and doing work at a number of other studios in his spare time.

When I got into town, Shawn immediately thrust a couple beers into my hands, and said that we were going to a punk show that evening. That kind of took me by surprise, but he said he wanted to go to the “Pub 340” to see an album release show by Cambridge. It sounded good to me, so we had a few more drinks and went to the bar.





Upon getting to the bar, we had a few more rounds of drinks, and Shawn gave me some background on Vancouver’s punk rock scene. Shawn actually produced the Cambridge album, so he knew a lot of the people in the bar. Shots of Jagermeister were only $3 each (ridiculously cheap for Vancouver), so before long, I knew a lot of people too.

There were actually four bands playing, although I only saw two of them. I think Loose Tooth was on stage when we got there, and they were singing a song that went something like, “America can suck my dick, Canada’s gonna make you her bitch.” I’m not entirely sure about the lyrics – things were already getting a bit hazy by that point. And for any Americans reading this, you shouldn’t worry that this was a sign of anti-American sentiment in your northern neighbours – I think this was actually a song of affection (after all, it was a punk rock show).

I was outside while the third band played, so I missed them entirely, but we got back inside when Cambridge was about to start. Shawn got right up into the mosh pit, while I tried to stay a bit more restrained, and took photos. The band was tight, and the crowd was into the music (and seemed to know the songs very well). It was pretty amusing seeing people getting thrown onto the stage, then back off the stage into the crowd, and dancing and smashing into each other. One of the highlights was when it looked like the head of the bass player’s instrument swung around and smashed into a bottle of beer that someone was taking a drink from. I wonder if it was a member of Loose Tooth? As Monty Python once said, “Now you see the violence inherent in the system.”





The rest of the night was fairly chaotic. We ran into two guys who were getting into a fist-fight on Hastings Street, and one of them had dropped a box of pizza on the ground just before they started fighting, so I went up and asked them if I could have the pizza. I also seem to remember Shawn trying to climb onto the roof of the Price Waterhouse building, so I could get a photo of him up there, although that memory is kind of vague. Anyway, it was an interesting start to the weekend.

The Tragically Hip

I saw the Tragically Hip playing in Halifax last night at the Metro Centre. It was packed, not surprisingly. And since my blog is read by a lot of music fans who live outside of Canada, I need to do a bit of promotion here. If you’re Canadian, you can pretty much stop reading now, because you’ll already know a lot about this band. But if you want to learn more, carry on.





First, you need to know that “The Hip” are Canada’s greatest rock band. The drummer, Johnny Fay, was once interviewed by Billboard, and when the subject of being in Canada’s best band came up, he said it was, “kind of like being the world’s tallest midget.” In 1989, the band apparently did a show where they opened for Nirvana, and less than a hundred people showed up.

The group has ten studio albums to their credit at the moment (disregarding their first self-titled album, which was only an EP). If I had to pick my favorites, I would recommend their first five albums, starting with “Up To Here,” and with “Fully Completely” probably being my top choice. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to any of the albums that came after “Trouble At The Henhouse.” I need to go out and buy the others though, because I know a few of the songs on them, and I know that I'm missing out on other gems.

I’ve seen the Hip perform dozens of times. The first times were in Banff in 1990. I had a few weeks off from my summer job planting trees, so I decided to hitchhike to Banff to wash dishes in a restaurant (The Magie & Stump) to pass the time for a week. During that week, I went with a couple friends to the Silver City nightclub every single evening. There was a band playing, and I thought that they were pretty good. Nobody else seemed to agree, because except for Friday and Saturday night, there were only about ten people in the bar each night. Anyway, after seeing them the first night, I was hooked. I kept coming back, and I watched them from about ten feet away, five or six nights that week. It wasn’t until about four or five years later, when they were starting to get famous and I saw them play at Mount Allison University, that I recognized them and realized that it was the same band. Since then, I’ve seen them in quite a few full concerts, and I also saw them in a small venue in Edmonton when they did their album release for “In Between Evolution,” with just a couple hundred people invited. I have photos from that night online here:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_hip.html

An interesting thing about the Hip is that if I had to pick my favorite five songs, I couldn’t. Not a chance. I might be able to get away with my favorite thirty, but even that would be hard to narrow down. Their music and sound are solid, and even though I’m not usually one to pay a lot of attention to lyrics, Gord Downie is brilliant. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if he writes all the lyrics. I’ve always assumed so, because he is their lead singer, but that’s not necessarily true. His improvisational abilities in live shows though, are legendary.

“New Orleans Is Sinking” was one of their earliest songs, written a decade and a half ago, and it’s one of their best-known songs. However, after Katrina, many radio stations stopped playing it in deference to the residents of New Orleans. The Hip are actually playing a show in New Orleans on October 20th of this year.

Anyway, so if you like rock music, and haven’t listened to this band before, take a Canadian’s advice and check them out. If this is the first you’ve heard about them, you’re missing out on one of Canada’s best-kept secrets.

Talking To A Crow

An hour ago, I thought I was losing my mind. I’m sure that hundreds of other people have already come to that conclusion, but today I was even questioning it myself.

You see, I was sitting out on the back lawn, doing some research. Well, to be more exact, I was laying in the sun, but also trying to finish some reading. Anyway, as I was reading, I thought I heard the neighbour saying hello. But it sounded like her voice was in that funny sort of tone and cadence you hear when an adult is talking to a pet or a small child. Then I heard a crow cawing back. There are a lot of crows living around my house, so I didn’t really think much of it – my neighbour must be sitting on her back porch, talking to a crow.

Anyway, after I heard this conversation back and forth five or six times between the neighbour and the crow, I started to think, “This is a little odd.” So I sat up and turned around to get a better point of view. I was quite surprised to see a crow sitting in the tree about thirty feet away, staring at me. No neighbour. I was even more surprised when it opened its mouth and said “hello” to me. And this wasn’t any random squack that could possibly be interpreted as a similar sound. No, this was a perfectly clearly enunciated greeting. And then the same crow screeched at me with a loud caw a few seconds afterwards, when I didn’t answer back. It then waited for a moment then said hello to me again, so I spoke back to it (feeling kind of foolish). After that, it was quiet and just stared at me for a while.

Now I was pretty wide awake, so this wasn’t a daydream. And although this is Frosh Week at the university, which means that the alcohol is flowing pretty freely, I myself haven’t had a drop since April (although that’s going to change tonight because I’m DJ’ing at a house party down in Halifax). So in other words, I wasn’t under the influence, and this crow really did seem to be talking to me.

Crows are extremely intelligent birds. I’ve observed them (and lots of other wildlife) for years as a tree planter. I’ve seen crows go from cache to cache on a block, dragging tree planters’ backpacks from out under the corner of tarps, unzipping them to get inside, and dragging out their plastic lunch bags. The Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds says that some crows in Japan, when trying to crack walnuts, will allegedly wait by intersections until traffic lights turn red, then fly down and place walnuts on the road in front of waiting cars’ tires, then get out of the way, then fly back down to recover the meat of the walnut after the lights change and the cars have driven over the walnuts. Crows have frequently been observed mastering the art of making and using simple tools, such as bending materials into hooks to retrieve food that they cannot reach themselves.

Researchers have said that American crows have a rudimentary language of about twenty or so “words” that are used to communicate with each other, and that the crows understand the concept of numbers and basic counting. Apparently, it is fairly easy to teach them to mimic simple human speech, and they also sometimes learn to mimic the noise of other animals. If parrots can be taught to talk, it’s not surprising that crows can too. The only thing that puzzles me right now is trying to figure out whether this particular crow learned this trick from watching humans, or if someone in the area has actually tried to teach it to talk.

Alright, to finish this post off, here's a pretty funny pun:

Q: Why was the detective so interested in a small group of crows?
A: He thought it was an attempted murder.

My apologies to the non-ornithologists - that one will go over the heads of SO many people reading this.

The Tequila Wave of 2001

I was just going through some old data files, and I found an amusing video. It's from the Mount Allison University Pub, where in 2001, Drew Dudley decided that he would try to set a world record for the most consecutive people taking shots of tequila. The whole point of the exercise was to be a fun & unique way to raise money for Shinerama. Everyone who participated paid $10 to join, and all that money went as a donation to the Shinerama campaign. The folks who distribute Jose Cuervo tequila made arrangements so that someone could cover the costs of the tequila consumed. Here is the video, filmed in the Pub one afternoon just before supper:



YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v8g02iREBo

There's also a page on the Pub website that has more details:
http://www.mta.ca/pub/tequila.html

Looking back, it's neat seeing a ton of my old friends and staff members on the video. And strangely enough, even though it was about six years ago now that this event took place, several of those people are still working at or near Mount Allison. Also notable: as much as Drew was able to set a lot of records during his years as a Shinerama Director, both at Mount Allison and in other parts of Canada, I think this is probably the fastest time (four minutes) that he was ever able to raise $2000.

I'm going to try to tag a bunch of the people I recognize when this feeds out to my Facebook Notes - so far, I can see about fifty people that participated and who are in my Facebook friends list. It's pretty entertaining, at least for any of us that were there when it happened, and it's making me look forward to Homecoming Weekend at the university in just another three weeks or so. I'm going to have to keep digging around and see what other old videos I can find to share around.

That's What Friends Are For

I don't usually re-hash articles that were in the news, but this one really caught my attention this morning:

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- A Japanese biker failed to notice that his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2 km, leaving a friend to pick up the missing limb.

The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends on Monday, west of Tokyo, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier.

He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction, the paper quoted local police as saying.

I don't know, but you'd think the missing leg would throw him a little bit off-balance.

You Can Do It, Put Your Back Into It

I have a motto in life. It goes, “Anything is possible. Sometimes it just takes a little while to figure out how to do it.” I would describe myself as more of a realist than an optimist, but others would disagree. I’ve developed that mindset after a number of seasons of tree planting. It’s a pretty tough job, so obviously a person has to be fairly stubborn and have a great deal of perseverance to do the job well. Running a crew is even harder. I am working in an outdoor environment, in rugged conditions, with equipment that frequently breaks down, while babysitting about sixty people for three months.

After a couple summers of being a foreman/supervisor, I thought to myself one spring day, “I’ve seen it all. I know how to do this job as well as anybody could. I am ready for anything. I’m not going to see anything new this summer that I don’t already know how to deal with.” However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. That was over a decade ago, and I still deal with new challenges and learn new things every single week that I’m out here. And I don’t mind that – I always did like puzzles and challenges when I was young.

[Note, August 12th: I wrote the rest of this post a couple weeks ago, but I'm only getting around to posting it to my blog today].

I’ve mentioned before that I keep daily diaries of my planting adventures on my www.Replant.ca website. However, most of those are just “quick summaries” of what happened on a particular day. For example, the other day I wrote, “I got stung a couple times in the corner of the eye and eyelid by a wasp today.” You might think to yourself, “That’s crazy!” But a planter wouldn’t find it to be very out-of-the-ordinary. If I mentioned that in camp at supper, people around me would nod their heads, and maybe say, “yeah, lots of wasps on the block today,” and go back to eating their dinner. I might get some sympathy and attention for all of about four seconds. However, I get a lot of emails from people (non-planters) who think I make up most of the stuff in the diaries, because so much of it seems ridiculous. Not so – I just describe “normal” everyday events.

Anyway, today was an interesting day. I was supervising three employees who were planting a fairly unique block. Most cut-blocks are big chunks of land that were harvested in some sort of square or rectangular or amoeba-like pattern, depending on where the good timber was. However, this particular block was an old road, so it was about eight trees wide and several kilometers long. In other words, it was a very unconventional and awkward shape. The block had been “furrowed” once with some sort of skidder or tractor, to try to loosen up the soil, but it didn’t do a very good job, so it was really hard to drive our shovels into the ground in many places. We didn’t think we could get the block done by ourselves, but we worked pretty hard and we finished at around 6pm despite the temperature hovering around thirty degrees Celcius all day.

Supper was at 6:30pm, but we realized that we’d be a bit late. First, we had to walk out to the front of the block, since we finished off the day near the back. Then we had to walk back out to the truck; a bridge had been removed from our access road, so we had to park about four kilometers from the beginning of the block this morning. I had a quad to move trees around today, but it wasn’t very healthy. In fact, during the day, it burned five litres of oil and two litres of gasoline (it needed a ring job). If you know anything about motors/engines, you know that’s a big problem. Anyway, the quad died as I was about to drive it out to the truck, so Kristin and I ended up having to push it several kilometers back to the truck, while Colleen steered it. And before we got there, we had to push the quad through a river (which the bridge no longer crossed) to actually get to the truck.

When we got to the truck, I had a new challenge. I didn’t have quad ramps, and even if I did, I couldn’t exactly drive the quad up into the back of the truck since the motor had seized. At first, I considered lifting the quad into the truck by myself. I’ve done it before, but it isn’t easy (actually, that’s a huge understatement – I’ve had an easier time flipping full fuel barrels into a truck, and they weigh 460 pounds each). The last time that I had to put a quad into a truck by myself, it took me a while to stand it up vertically (using rocks to brace the tires), then I backed the truck up “under” the front wheels, pushed the front wheels over onto the tailgate, and then lifted the back end of the quad into the truck. However, I did that with a Honda 350, and this quad was a 450, which was considerably heavier (over 500 pounds). Besides, Joanne and the other two girls would be there waiting to see how I’d deal with the problem, and I didn’t want to embarass myself by saying that I could lift it into the truck by myself, and then be the brunt of a bunch of “so you can’t get it up” jokes if it turned out to be too heavy. So I tried to think of a new plan. I figured that I could find a four-foot-high bank somewhere within a kilometer or so, then push the quad up onto the bank, then back the truck up to the bank, then push the quad into the truck. But before I got to that point, I miraculously found a pair of long planks, and I was able to use them as ramps so I could push the quad up into the truck, while the girls kept the quad steering straight. Problem solved.

Then, as I was fastening the quad into the truck, I discovered a new problem – a flat tire on the rear of the truck. I figured that it was a slow leak, and I could probably just pump the tire back up and make it back to camp. I smiled to myself and pulled out the brand new electric tire pump that I had bought from Canadian Tire a week ago, still in the package. The girls were impressed. I tried to inflate the tire and discovered that the cord on the pump wasn’t long enough to reach the back wheels. The girls were no longer impressed. Neither was I. If anyone from Canadian Tire is reading this right now, please tell either your engineers or your purchasing managers that they are morons (and yes, I’m also a moron for not having taken it out of the package and testing it before I assumed that I could rely on it).

So, I needed to change the tire. The spare was pretty muddy, so I had to chip off a bunch of mud then wash the lug nuts so I didn’t strip the posts while taking the nuts off. The axle-jack wouldn’t raise the truck high enough to let me “spin” the wheel wrench, so I got smart and dug a hole beside the tire so I could do that and get the nuts off more quickly. Then, when I tried to put the spare tire on, I had a similar problem because the jack would not go high enough to give it enough clearance to go onto the hub, so I dug another hole under the tire. Eventually I got the tire changed and all the gear loaded. Of course, that was another story, considering that we also had a dozen boxes of trees left over, plus the gear, plus the quad, plus the garbage, all to be fit into the back of just one open-back pickup. But with some creative packing, we got it all into one load, and we even brought home the two large planks that I had used as ramps, for no apparent reason.

I considered this to be a typical day.

You can see the kind of challenges that we have to deal with pretty much every day. None of the girls were the slightest bit surprised that “so much” could go wrong, nor were they surprised that we managed to successfully deal with all the problems in the space of not much over an hour. That’s just the mindset you need to have if you’re going to mentally survive as a planter. It doesn’t help to sit on a rock and wish that someone would come along to make your problems disappear. You have to rely on your own ability/creativity, and try to be prepared or at least try to anticipate possible problems in advance. Getting mad doesn’t help. Having a breakdown doesn’t solve your problem. Having a positive attitude is your biggest asset.

We made it home for supper by 8:30pm, so it wasn’t that big of a deal – just another day in the life. We had enough problems to be a bit annoying, but nothing that I wouldn’t have expected. Earlier though, when we were pushing the quad through the river, Kristin had taken her boots off so they’d stay dry, and waded through in her bare feet. The bottom of the river had some nice round stones which were comfortable on her feet, and she suddenly stopped and looked at me. Despite the hard day we’d had and the problems we were trying to deal with, she seemed to have faith that everything would work out well in the end, and she didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned or impatient. She smiled at me and said, “You know, tree planting really makes you appreciate the little things in life.”

That’s the kind of attitude you need if you’re going to be happy as a tree planter. And that kind of attitude will probably make you a lot happier about life in general. God bless that girl.

CN Rail Derailment

This past Saturday, we had a bit of local excitement, as CN Rail had yet another train derailment which made the national news. The accident happened just a couple kilometers from our office (which is located in the railway industrial site in Prince George). The track that was involved in the accident actually passes about ten feet behind our company’s garage before it swings out and along the Fraser River.

I’ve got a friend who works as an engineer at CN, so I got the whole story that evening, but the simple version is that a train was unable to stop in time and hit another train that was crossing that truck, and the engine and a couple cars derailed. The engine caught on fire, and a load of lumber and a diesel tanker also burned. Since the accident was right across the river from the center of the city, pretty much everybody in Prince George was able to get a good view of it. And of course, there was a lot of anger and concern because this was just another in a long string of recent railway accidents in western Canada, and because the diesel may or may not have spilled into the Fraser (endangering the Sockeye salmon, which are just starting to spawn). Here’s a photo:





They also had water bombers circling for several hours, so it was pretty good entertainment for a Saturday afternoon of a holiday long weekend. I was working through the day, so I didn’t manage to go down to the park across the river from the accident to get a better photo. But you can probably find a decent photo at this link:

http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/6667/3/cn+derailment+debriefing

Anyway, the thing that struck me as being kind of ironic about this was listening to everybody talk about the accident. People seemed pretty angry about this being such a huge environmental problem (especially because a body of water was involved). But really, it wasn’t very big compared to other environmental problems that we cause. The government probably introduces far more oil into the environment every year just by putting used motor oil on forestry roads around here for dust control. And there are lots of other much larger (global-scale) environmental problems happening around us every day that nobody gets worked up about, which I think is rather frustrating. Take the case of all the plastic accumulating in our oceans as a prime example.

In the center of the Pacific Ocean, there is apparently an area that is approximately the size of Texas, literally (litter-ly?) covered with plastic trash. Due to the specific currents and wind patterns, this area is sort of like an oceanic desert with very little marine life or biodiversity – it is just a large featureless geographic area of little interest to humans. The winds are very minimal in this area, so the entire area just sort of swirls around extremely slowly, without much happening for excitement. The water is deep, and no plants are able to grow on the bottom of the sea since sunlight doesn’t penetrate that far. The bottom of the ocean is nutrient-rich from millions of years of organics sinking through the water, but the fish and aquatic life generally can’t get down to this nutrient layer, and there are no winds or strong currents to stir it up and get it near enough the surface to be used as a source of food for marine life. The only real food supply in the area is the development of plankton (based on photosynthesis) but there isn’t much in the way of traditional fish, just lots of jellyfish and similar species, which have no commercial interest to humans.

Anyway, plastics don’t really biodegrade. Most other trash does, but the only thing that plastics do is break down (after a number of years) into smaller pieces of plastic. Eventually, these plastics will break down into individual molecules of plastic, so they are out of sight, but not out of mind. Many scientists figure that these individual molecules of plastic may remain intact for centuries before they are finally naturally torn apart (in a chemical sense). Unfortunately, these molecules of plastic enter the food chain in smaller organisms, and eventually many of them make their way up into the bodies of larger marine or avian organisms (or even into peoples’ bodies), where they become toxic in significant quantities.

Studies of the large oceanic accumulation of plastic, the area known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, have shown that the volume of plastics floating around is about six times the volume of naturally occuring zooplankton. For every square kilometer of surface area, there are many kilograms of discarded plastic items of every type imaginable. Now this isn’t something that is completely covering the surface of the water, but there is enough material there to make the ocean’s surface look like a McDonald's parking lot at 1:30am on a Saturday night.

Hundreds of thousands of marine birds and mammals are dying from the plastics in our oceans every year. No national governments seem to care about the trash accumulating in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, because it is not in any nation’s territorial waters. Since it isn’t a rich aquatic zone, no nations rely on it for commercial fisheries. I wish there was a way that some nation could provide funding for some ships to go out into that area with large surface trawl nets of some sort to collect the plastics (without somehow snaring the marine life) and then incinerate the trash. In the coming decades and centuries, even though this area is not a major source of food for people, it would still be nice to clean it up. I’m not a big fan of leaving garbage everywhere, as you can probably guess.

Here’s a photo of a dead seabird, which has decayed somewhat so you can see the stomach contents:





Basically, untold numbers of animals are dying of starvation, while their stomachs are actually quite full. It’s a shame that they are full of the trash that humans are producing, but it’s just one more example of how we’re destroying our planet.

And for all the people who complain about how global warming is causing the ice caps to melt, which is raising the levels of the Earth's ocean by a couple millimeters per year, maybe it isn't global warming? Maybe the levels are rising because we're filling our oceans up with garbage.