you're the ocean.

ever since i was a little kid, i was fascinated by the ocean. it's my favorite place to be.
when we visited san francisco and went to cafe gratitude with jon marro, the question of the day was 'when do you feel most at ease?' - and without even really thinking about it i could say that i feel most at ease when i sit at the beach listening to music and just watching the waves. watching the sun go down, listening to the sound of the waves coming in, my feet in the sand.

i feel at home when i'm near the ocean. that's why i am going to live there one day.
since i came here to the states, i realized two completely different things, yet connected. the first thing's that i might want to live in australia, study marine biology and work at the great barrier reef. just a thought though, and a dream of mine. i never went scuba-diving, but seeing hawai'i's underwater world fascinates me. see turtles, dolphins, colorful fish and whale sharks [well, i didn't actually see that one live yet]...

if it's not kids i want to work with, it's animals. and those are some of the most beautiful and fascinating ones i can imagine.

the states are one of the worst countries when it comes to saving the planet. april 22 is coming up. earth day. the day we put our planet first. try to decrease our impact on mother nature by choosing 'healthier' lifestyles, planting a tree or just being a little more aware of the impact humans have.
i like the idea of doing something to protect the environment, but only once a year?
at college, my final presentation was about the 3 r's - 'reducing, reusing and recycling', because i wanted to bring up that topic again. they recycle, at least my first american family did - a little. plastic marked with special numbers, cans and bottles and paper. but the rest of the plastic, food, tissues...everything goes together. and i think most of the americans don't give a damn. it's even hard for me to recycle when there are no seperate trash-bins.

but other than that, i too often find myself buying coffee or smoothies, which all come in plastic cups. and i'm not the only one. i don't know how many people do that every day but it feels like billions.

did you know that millions of tons of plastic end up in the ocean, especially the pacific one?

there is a large amount of plastic floating around, it's size varies from 'larger than the continental u.s.' to 'smaller than twice the size of texas'. which is still a lot. it even has its own name. the great pacific garbage patch.
you can't see it from space, because plastic crumbles down. after it enters the ocean it gets smaller and smaller until some birds or fish mistake it for food and eat it. and what if they eat it? don't we eventually consume the fish?

so what do they eat? and what's the big deal?
just a few days ago i went to a beautiful, kind of hidden beach on kaua'i. it's not far from poipu, where i stayed. i just wanted to check it out, but when i arrived i saw all that garbage and plastic lying around. unfortunately i didn't have any bag to collect it, so i promised to come back. packed with two [ironically] plastic bags i stopped. it kinda looks like that out there.

a long, beautiful, deep blue beach under bright blue skies. but if you look closer, this is everywhere.

literally, everywhere. you couldn't walk two meters before stepping on some plastic. and it all comes from the sea where the water sometimes holds six times more plastic than plankton. the major part comes from the shore and returns to it. partly. since it is breaking down out there, nearly everything is accumulating in the pacific gyre. no place can be found anymore without any pollution.

part of it reaches the beautiful hawaiian shores though. it makes the beaches sometimes more colorful. blue, green, orange. every color that is used to make plastic bottles, caps or nets, mats and tubes. i have no idea how it ends up out there. why in the world would you throw such things out into the ocean or leave them at the beach?
well, it makes sense if you read the numbers. only less than 5 percent of our plastic is recycled globally.

what happens out there is that the plastic photo-degrades. the sunlight breaks the plastic down into smaller pieces. they eventually become so small, that you can't even see them anymore. single molecules. and they then get eaten by so many animals that live out there and are not able to digest plastic. nobody is. so those animals die. or we end up eating them.

or at the northwestern hawaiian islands coral reef ecosystem reserve, those adorable mammals get entangled in debris like plastic nets lost or discarded by the fishing industry. hawaiian monk seals.

they are one of the most endangered mammal species in the world and can be found resting at almost every beach in hawaii. people are not allowed to get close to them, because of the danger for the people themselves but far more important to the seals. if they're forced to get back into the water they do not get enough rest.

seeing all this precious life out here makes me more than sad, even mad, how we treat our planet. there is hardly any respect for mother nature and only a few people seem to care.
after like an hour of cleaning up, this bag was filled up, ripping because of the weight. it doesn't look like much and it sure didn't feel like anything at all having the vast pollution in mind.

but if everyone would just do a little. recycle. always take ALL your trash wish you and recycle. pick up something someone else has left behind instead of pretending to not care. try to replace plastic by other materials. like reusable bottles instead of plastic. recycled paper-bags instead of plastic.

if you think it doesn't matter anyway, it does. you matter. your actions matter.
help to make this planet a better world. for everyone.
mahalo.