Bag Lady

“We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one. It took billions of years to develop. We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?”—Buckminster Fuller

Little plastic bags seem so innocuous. But they’re deadly. We’re all finding this out little by little; indeed we must, for if we don’t we’ll all lose.

Rebecca Hosking, a wildlife filmmaker was so upset and appalled by seeing hundreds of albatross chicks dying on a remote Hawaiian atoll due to mountains of plastic bags and other rubbish.

Ms. Hosking was galvanized by the sight and now she’s leading a revolution against the plastic bag. She feels the Laysan albatross is the “supreme being of the ocean.”

The birds form a life partnership beginning with a very comic courtship ritual. "I would defy anyone not to fall in love with an albatross once they have watched it," she says. "They are the supreme being of the ocean."

The albatross eat anything that’s colorful on the surface of the ocean. Sadly, many of these colorful things are not their natural food, but rather plastic detritus like cigarette lighters and toothbrushes, toys and medical waste from our throw-away culture.

The poor mother birds eat these toxic items, fly as far as 2,000 miles, then regurgitate to their offspring whose stomachs fill up and then they die of starvation.

Our appetite for the plastic bag is disturbing. About one million are used every minute. Every year each person on the planet will consume 300 of them.

Ms. Hosking says, "Plastic stays in the environment between 500 and 1,000 years. Every plastic item that was ever made is still in existence. Some of it starts to break down—maybe into tiny pieces—but it is still there."

This is serious. Listen to what the albatross and other species are trying to tell us. Shouldn’t we join Ms. Hosking in her fight to help not only the albatross, but all of us as well as our own home, Mother Earth?

Watch this adorable albatross courtship dance and enjoy this lovely little BBC film of the majestic albatross with David Attenborough.

Rebecca Hosking at age 6. She started early!

So let’s join Rebecca—send those plastic bags into history and continue our journey on this beautiful, precious Earth.
 

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Sharon Azar is an assistant to the editorial staff at GUIDEPOSTS. In her spare time, she rescues dogs and does portraits of furry, feathered and scaled companion animals. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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