The Wounded Sea

 
For those who can't stand reading about the death of the Ocean, this week's NYT Magazine is no help at all. It features a long article by Donovan Hohn called Sea of Trash, focusing on one small part of the problem, the enormous accumulation of discarded plastics in the Pacific in an immense, slowly rotating assembly of detritus called the Garbage Patch, a portion of which has followed the prevailing North Pacific current to landfall on a remote beach in Alaska.

If reading about it is too hard, here's a series of videos on VBS.tv devoted to the Garbage Patch that you might watch instead. No one has a solution, no easy solution, no hard solution, no magical solution: the Ocean is deeply wounded. If this is all too depressing, check out the VBS.tv series on tourism in North Korea. It's a veritable laugh riot by comparison.