"With his cruel bow he laid full low The harmless Albatross."

We are a throw away generation. The perception of the quality of life is spent on temporary things, convenient things that we can all so easily forget about in a moment. We do not realize how great the consequences of this are. How much they have effected life in many forms. http://vimeo.com/25563376 this video has a huge impact on showing in a very blatant form that there are huge consequences to this mass consumerism. Chris Jordan makes a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This well-known piece of literature describes the consequences of the unnecessary murder of an albatross and the consequences that ensued afterwards. Just like in the tale this can all be avoided. Nature doesn’t have to be ruined and animals don’t have to die. There is no justification, it’s just bad habits and absent minded decisions that are to blame. Which is basically all of us, we are all to blame.

I will admit I harbor these bad habits, I’ve grown up this way. I just throw away whatever without even thinking about it. In fact I didn’t think about these consequences much until recently watching this and seeing it completely without any sugar coating. For me I need to have the courage to not be absent minded about this. I need to know exactly what is happening, why its happening, and how I as an individual can be a part of the change. To begin I have found some really good facts from http://www.reuseit.com/facts-and-myths/impact-of-plastic-waste-on-oceans-beaches-and-the-environment.htm

“• Plastic bags are among the top two items of debris found most often in coastal cleanups. (Ocean Conservancy)

• Plastic bags wrap around living corals, quickly "suffocating" and killing them. (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

• Plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the Central North Pacific by a factor of 6 to 1. (Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

• Plastic pieces can attract and hold hydrophobic elements like PCB and DDT up to 1 million x background levels. As a result, floating plastic is like a poison pill. (Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

• Approximately 500 nautical miles off the California coast sits a growing "plastic island," a gargantuan patch of floating plastic trash held together by currents stretching across the northern Pacific almost as far as Japan. This "plastic island" is made up of about 7 billion pounds of plastic garbage, and measures about twice the size of Texas.

• Each year, enough trash—most of it plastic—floats down the Los Angeles River to fill the Rose Bowl two stories deep. (Los Angeles Times, "Altered Oceans")

• Of 500,000 albatross chicks born each year on Midway Atoll, about 200,000 die of starvation. Adult albatrosses mistake plastic trash for food and end up feeding it to their chicks. (L.A. Times)

• On a single day in 2007, nearly 400,000 volunteers around the world picked up more than 6 million pounds of trash. A majority of the items were single-use disposable plastic items, such as plastic bags and Styrofoam containers. (Ocean Conservancy International)

• Since water keeps the plastic cool and algae blocks ultraviolet rays, "every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere." (Research Triangle Institute)”

And these aren’t even the tip of the iceberg in comparison to all the environmental turmoil we are causing.

We have become less efficient as a society in regards to consumerism, its more about the market and selling things than being efficient.

I believe the reason there hasn’t been much of a change yet is because of all these big companies. They know what’s going on but they don’t want to lose money by raising much awareness. I know that different companies have made their products recyclable. But it’s not advertised very much. None of the things that are happening are widely known by people. I know if I were to bring this up to my parents right now they would probably scoff in disbelief and I feel like they wouldn’t care.

Ultimately we need more awareness about this. That’s where the courage comes in, it’s making people aware and showing them exactly what’s happening. But I know that the change starts with me, just like with everyone the change will start with them.