It was only a few years ago that humanity identified the global plastics catastrophe. It turns out nature has a lot more ways of managing plastics than anyone knew.
The basic scenario is that microplastics are in everything from the top of Mt Everest to living placentas. It’s everywhere. Huge amounts of plastics and microplastics are forming gigantic areas of floating garbage in the oceans, particularly the northern Pacific. (Check out this excellent video by What Da Math for a good, clear overview.)
If you like cosmic irony in the face of human stupidity, you’ll love how Ma Nature is managing the mess. The life-threatening plastics are being turned into assets:
- Sea creatures are colonizing the big rafts of plastics. They’re now so common they’re called “neopelagics”, meaning “new ocean dwellers”. The net effect is really the equivalent of creating whole new continent-sized marine environments. It looks like the rafts are creating their own unique ecologies.
- Tests have shown that many bacteria have evolved (or maybe already had and simply turned on) enzymes which can eat plastics. These bacteria include soil and marine bacteria. The enzymes are so credible there’s already major commercial competition to develop them. The big shock is that there are so many of these bacteria, and so many specific enzymes.
- These new artificial habitats could, in theory, produce a sort of reboot of damaged marine ecosystems. They could recharge the marine food chains, creating new nutrient cycles from algae to top predators. Even the illegal drift nets and other trash from the overfishing atrocities are being incorporated into these new habitats. Irony indeed.
- Some of the garbage patches are sailing around over “marine deserts”. These relatively lifeless areas are now, very ironically, being colonized thanks to the floating garbage habitats. That also means more nutrients piling up on sea floors.
An even better option for greening the oceans? Yes.
Rafting, preferably on a less grotesque basis, could well be an almost perfect solution for greening the oceans and undoing centuries of damage. Given the huge demand for seafood and the mindless destruction of seafood stocks, this could be the solution.
You could have “free-range aquaculture” on a global scale using floating rafts held by currents like the garbage patches. The rafts could restock ocean food chains with a good selection of core fisheries elements from microfauna and flora to macrofauna and things like kelps.
You could do coral reef regeneration and local habitat restoration, too. You could adapt rafts as reboots for any sort of environment on the same general principle.
The basic structure of the garbage patches also plays to something Nature does best of all – Opportunistic exploitation of environments. This type of habitat-on-demand could virtually self-manage. We could go from a total global oceanic train wreck to working oceans pretty quickly.
The bottom line here is that these things desperately need to be studied and properly understood. The plastics are delivering a lot of options for fixing them.
Lousy management of the planet has created way too many problems. Fixing the oceans means fixing a vast area of the planet as well as the food chain problems. Might even reboot the water cycles worldwide, and help fix that.
The sooner this pigsty of a planet is cleaned up the better. To maybe coin a saying; “Take out the garbage before it takes you out”.
