Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Cleaning up the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch


I don’t know about you but photos of the big patch of plastic and garbage floating in the ocean scares me more than almost anything else. Nearly 90% of plastic bottles are not recycled, instead taking thousands of years to decompose. If you are used to toting around your green tea, juice or iced coffee in plastic, get a cool-looking thermos instead. This is a great choice for the environment, your wallet, and possibly your health. You can guzzle as much as you want and still be “green.”

Global warming isn’t the only environmental nightmare that scientists are struggling to solve.
Millions of tons of plastic waste litter the world’s oceans, converging together in rotating currents called gyres and blanketing the water’s surface. On average, these gyres now hold six times more plastic than plankton by dry weight.
Fortunately, 19-year-old Boyan Slat, founder and president of The Ocean Cleanup, claims to “have invented a method to clean up almost half of the great Pacific’s garbage patch in just 10 years, using currents to [his] advantage.”
The self-described environmentalist and entrepreneur first presented his revolutionary ideas at a TEDx Talk in the Netherlands and was recently named one of Intel’s 20 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs Worldwide (Intel EYE50).
Slat first became aware of the problem while diving in Greece, frustrated that he was “coming across more plastic bags than fish.”
He asked himself, “Why can’t we clean this up?”
At least one million birds and another 100,000 marine mammals die each year from the plastic, and a number of species risk extinction due to the massive amounts of plastic circulating the oceans.
Economically, marine debris costs an estimated $1.27 billion annually in fishing and vessel damage on America’s Pacific coastal waters

Friday, June 3, 2016

200 Squares a day



Do you know how much an elephant needs to eat per day? At least 200 pounds of chow! Spring for $30 bucks and you can feed a “retired” elephant all day long. Many of the denizens of Tennessee elephant sanctuary are former showgirls who left the three rings circus behind. Check out www.elephants.com

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Help those TO help themselves

We all remember the Biblical parable about teaching a man to fish so he can provide for himself and his family. Two thousand years later, we can do exactly this. My dad taught me how to fish in a pond back home on the farm in West Virginia and, even as a 7 year-old, I could not help but notice that we not only got a couple day’s worth of yummy trout for our efforts but my papa, a former Marine with many battle scars to show for it, seemed so relaxed after an afternoon at the pond. You can gift in a loved one’s name a $49 fishing kit or up to $100 for a daily goat to Action against Hunger (www, ActionAgainstHunger.org), which feeds over 7 million, people each year. Go fish!