Talking trash

Natural History, Feb, 2004

The picture of the dead albatross in Charles Moore's article ["Trashed," 11/03] has affected me beyond description. If there ever was a need to do something about our wasteful lifestyles, now is the time. We have given lip service to recycling, but it is time that we did something to cut down and eliminate packaging and excess wrapping of products so that we can leave a planet to our children and grandchildren where they can live in harmony with nature.

Susan A. Schiller

Denver, Colorado

The swill of bottle caps, baby toys, and countless plastic objects Charles Moore found throughout the eastern North Pacific gyre is both an aesthetic blight and a biological menace. Nearly half the world's marine mammal and seabird species and all of its sea turtles are known to either eat plastic debris or become entangled in it.

But gyres are not the only places where debris accumulates. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of nets and net scraps discarded or lost by North Pacific fishermen end up snagged on reefs in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. There they abrade coral and entangle endangered monk seals and sea turtles. The National Marine Fisheries Service has organized annual cleanups and removed more than a hundred tons of netting from those reefs since 1996. Unfortunately, such efforts are all too rare, because the attitude toward marine debris is "out of sight, out of mind."

Mr. Moore and Natural History do a great service by spotlighting this issue, for only with broader awareness can the will and resources be found to address it.

David W. Laist

Marine Mammal Commission

Bethesda, Maryland