A weekend visit to a small natural "beach" near the Genentech campus in South San Francisco reminded me of just how many varieties of plastic are floating around out there in our oceans and waterways. These shots represent just a small sample of debris from a tiny stretch of the San Francisco Bay measuring no more that 500 sq. ft. Pretty depressing. Then I watched the video below and got even more depressed.
I felt a little better when I read about funding to help clean up the Great Lakes, but the task still seems overwhelming. Reuters reports:
A year after President Barack Obama proposed a plan to clean up the Great Lakes, the government Sunday laid out its plan to improve the ecology of the major bodies of water that support much of U.S. agriculture and industry.Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson met with governors of states that touch the inland waterways to describe an "action plan" that will focus on eliminating invasive species, cleaning up pollutants, and remediating more than a half million acres of the area's wetlands, she told reporters.
"It's about creating a new standard of care for the Great Lakes system," Jackson said. "Instead of minimizing harm, our new standard of care is to leave the Great Lakes better for the next generation than the condition in which we inherited them."
