Perreault Magazine - 108 -
What specific event or experience triggered your passion and interest to get involved with the plastic pollution problem?
This question has become a constant refrain from the media and I find it particularly irritating in its implication that one must experience some sort of traumatic event in order to be a passionate and active environmentalist or political activist. The reality is that the human mind, if it has not been overtaken and diluted beyond rational thought be pervasive modes of distraction, must inevitably arrive at the conclusion that modern productivity is destroying its own ability to sustain itself as well as the biosphere. This destructiveness doesn’t stop there, however. It also eliminates the possibility of remediating the damage by insinuating plastic from tiny particles to airplane part sized objects into the entire marine and much of the terrestrial environment. This plastic pollution is ugly and will not go away, so that the primary ideal of humanity, that we can one day live in peace and happiness on a beautiful planet is crushed for future generations. I believe my passion and interest t get involved with the plastic pollution problem arose out of my gradually building outrage at the suppression of movements to upend once and for all the suicidal, self defeating and unnecessarily cruel trajectory of modern industrial civilization.
"As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic."
Capt. Charles Moore
Capt. Charles Moore is the Found of Algalita - Marine Research and Education.
The “blue water” sailor discovered in 1997, while returning home from Hawaii that the North Pacific Ocean was becoming “a disgusting, plastic cesspool.”