VBS.TV has a new 12 part series called Toxic: Garbage Island, a long-form (for web standards anyway) documentary on the North Pacific Garbage Patch.
I’ve posted about floating garbage island before and i’m sure if you ask any politician, they’d say it’s an urban myth hyped by Boing! Boing! conspiracy theorists. But it’s not! The folks at Vice sent a crew of people with video cameras out to the patch. Their verdict? Not only are the reports true, but it’s worse than they expected. There’s no patch and no island. Nothing that can be cleaned up easily. It’s a galactic mess of floating pieces slowly photodegrading into even tinier toxic, digestible pieces. everywhere and nowhere. a gigantic floating toxic stew. and it’s twice the size of Texas.
Stevey originally turned me on to the series a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to repost. With Earth Day tomorrow (Apr22), I thought I put the word out. The documentary is intense, horrifying and urgent. Special props to the Vice team for such engaging content. When watching it, you get the feeling that they didn’t quite know what they were getting in to and the narrator/host Thomas Morton keeps it interesting with an increasing use of curse words as they get further in to the garbage patch. Justifiable considering the horror show they encounter.
Relatedly: Check out this interview, Thomas Morton’s take on traditional (read: neo-hippy) environmentalism as he interviews the authors of Break Through, a book that calls for the “Death of Environmentalism” (or at least its current 60s era mentality). Morton can be a bit harsh and irreverent, but he makes some valid points.
