Trash World

The ocean has always been a garbage dump. Even very early on, when all we really wasted was walnut shells and oysters, that stuff went into the ocean. Some early caveman dumped it into the stream and it made its way into the water. We dumped bodies, ships crashed, and floods carried houses into the sea.

Back then, our technology was not advanced enough to make materials last. Wood rots and decomposes quickly. Now that we have plastic and metal, the things we dump in the ocean do not go away - at least not nearly as quickly. Plastic bottles take about 450 years to break down. That's four human lifetimes, and at least ten times as many fish lifetimes. Somewhere, out there, there is an entire lineage of fish that will live among plastic bottles and ocean trash. If these fish were sentient, bottles would be their landmarks and homes. Things that families would live and grow around, and maybe even worship. That's ignoring shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean, which stand as castles and complexes for seafloor ocean life. None of this was deliberate, but the trash we threw away seeded worlds that are yet to be entirely populated.



"Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

"It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world's leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the 'eastern garbage patch.'"

- Capt. Charles Moore, article for Natural History in 2003



There are nations of garbage floating in the ocean. This will not go away. We cannot just scoop this stuff up with a big net and dump it somewhere. Inevitably, all of this will head back to where it rests now. There's a very real and intriguing future where all that is left is our garbage. This bottle I'm drinking will last longer than me - and with a grim worldview, it might last longer than the majority of the human race.

When I'm writing this project, I have to consider the full history of the ocean. Most of that history, in truth, is just the story of a really large and interesting garbage can. From the industrial revolution onward, the story of the ocean is the story of our pollution.

We won't always be here, but our garbage will, and soon enough crabs will build their shells out of cans. Fish will live in bottles. This stuff won't always be garbage. Eventually, flecks of plastic will construct beaches. That's an interesting world that none of us will ever see.

For me, that's really interesting. Trash tells a story. The Ocean Beyond is drawn from all periods of the ocean - so expect garbage. But not how you know it now.