Monday, April 15, 2019

Creatures Die Because of Human Trash


A university professor with a doctorate in education writes in the Catholic Peace Weekly on the death of an ocean sunfish, found on the Australian coast. (They belong to the Molidae family a jelly-eating giant and the world's heaviest bony fish) It mistook a plastic bag floating in the sea for a jellyfish and died.
 

The professor sees often in the news how sea creatures are dying because of human trash. Seals found on a beach in England had plastic nets wrapped around their necks and oozing blood.The seals in a photograph were gazing at the readers as if appealing for help in their suffering. Seals had fishing lines around their throats, nets, and even bikini swimsuits.

In Pakistan, a sea turtle drowned in a burlap bag. He remembers birds dying in the tidal flats struggling for life in oil slime. Recently he saw a very shocking picture.  A mother bird feeding her young chicks on the island of the Midway, not food, but plastic chunks. Human trash is killing creatures on earth.

As we already know, there is a huge garbage island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Garbage that is abandoned all over the world ride the ocean currents to form the garbage dump. Its area is seven times that of the Korean peninsula and estimated in the near future to become "continental".

He read an article on the domestic garbage mountain in Korea, a story written by a reporter looking for garbage sites. There are 235 garbage mountains with trash over one 1 ton in the country. The scale is huge at 1.2 million tons. Half of these are in Gyeonggi Province. The reporter reported that the Uijeongbu mountain was not a mountain, but a mountain range. Construction waste, such as aluminum, plywood,  stainless steel bars, form the structure of the mountain. We live in an era where garbage is a disaster.

In order to fundamentally solve the garbage problem, we need to eat and possess less. Appetites are one of our biggest desires. The appetite should be enough to maintain the human body, but when we eat more than enough, there is a lot of food waste. Excessive appetite is producing waste. In addition, endless possessions have caused massive amounts of products to come from our factories. The produced products soon become waste. With the desire to have a house, and a bigger house, architectural waste forms a trash mountain. In order to fundamentally solve such garbage problems, it's necessary to control human needs. We need to eat and possess in moderation.
 

Naturalist thinker Henry David Thoreau said in Walden that humans spend too much on their daily necessities.  "For many creatures, there is in this sense but one necessity of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow." God found his creation extremely good, after creation, we are breaking down this beautiful creation with our trash.