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In this issue
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (1 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 14, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer : Add pesto to bean soup and get ready for yum --- in minutes!
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: How To Recognize A Control Freak, Part II (A VERY fast 14 minutes)
Oct. 13, 2009
Jonathan Rosenblum: Why Palestinian Incitement Matters So Much
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: How To Recognize A Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 12, 2009
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Shimmering paradoxes
JWisdom.com: One Small Spark … One Great Fire By Gavriel Aryeh Sanders (7 minutes)
Oct. 9, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Illusion of Influence
JWisdom.com: Take the Sage of St. Louis' Challenge by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: The newest round of war
Oct. 8, 2009
Joseph Aaron: What the Chicago Olympics failure must teach Jewry
JWisdom.com: Rehabbing The Thief Within by Sara Yoheved Rigler (9 minutes)
Oct. 7, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman : Sumptuous supper in the sukkah
JWisdom.com: Know an 'invincible' teen? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe (6 minutes)
Oct. 6, 2009
Alan H. Luxenberg: The Twilight Zone's Jewish soul
JWisdom.com: A Sage for Our Age --- and Only 238 Years old! by Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz(10 minutes)
Oct. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com: Harvesting Happiness By Rabbi Eytan Feiner (7 minutes)
Oct. 2, 2009
Rabbi Yitzhak Adlerstein: Happiness is a Warm Sukkah
JWisdom.com:Getting out of the rut and into the hut by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Oct. 1, 2009
Barry Horn: A spiritual force: Cowboys' Igor Olshansky takes a fierce pride in his Jewish faith
JWisdom.com:Defeating Your Inner Saboteur By Sara Yoheved Rigler (6 minutes)
Sept. 30, 2009
Yaffa Ganz: The Other 'Evil Eye'
JWisdom.com: Strong Willed Children make the best leaders: How to get them to that point by Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Richard Z. Chesnoff: Killing Kasztner, the Jew who bargained with Eichmann
Sept. 29, 2009
Mona Charen: Who Needs Religion?
JWisdom.com: Sukkos: Journey to Joy by Rabbi Harvey Belovski (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 8, 2006 / 14 Menachem-Av, 5766

The coming tsunami of trash

By Niall Ferguson


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There is a wonderfully sinister poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea," which depicts an Atlantis-like metropolis lost beneath the "melancholy waters" of a "lurid sea." The sea lures us from our cities to its shores at this time of year. This summer, however, I cannot help thinking of Poe's lines as a kind of prophecy:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.


Why am I haunted by this image of a sunken city? I think because it symbolizes the coming revenge of the sea on mankind for nearly a century of mistreatment. It was 99 years ago that Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the first plastic based on a synthetic polymer — Bakelite — and ushered in the age of plastic. From that moment, a new kind of pollutant entered the sea; one that took a century or more to degrade.

The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Program, about 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.

The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week, this newspaper carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer. Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of bottles thrown in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea. Albatrosses are not the only victims. Untold numbers of fish and marine mammals are killed each year by discarded fishing nets, compounding the chronic problem of overfishing. But what to do?

In economic terms, the pollution of the oceans is the ultimate "tragedy of the commons." As popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, the tragedy is that an area of open pasture will tend to be depleted and eventually destroyed if the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, while the costs of exploitation are shared. When people dump rubbish in the sea, they are acting like a medieval farmer who overgrazed the common land. The rubbish is disposed of at no cost to the polluter, just as the farmer's cattle get fed for free. But everyone loses if the sea becomes a cesspool, just as everyone lost if the commons became a desert.

There are two classic solutions to this kind of problem. The first is regulation by a higher authority. In the case of the oceans, this solution is already in place, in the form of the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The problem, as with so many U.N. documents, is the lack of effective enforcement. So what about the alternative solution, namely privatization?

In early modern England, common land was progressively "enclosed" — claimed and fenced by individual landowners. In theory, of course, some parts of the sea have already been enclosed, in that countries with coastlines lay claim to coastal waters and fisheries. Yet, even if all such claims were universally respected, vast tracts of the world's oceans would remain "no man's water." In any case, it is far from clear that national governments are effective custodians even of their own coastal waters, because it is precisely there that most pollution of the sea occurs.

This, then, could be the ultimate tragedy of the commons. "The men of the hydrocarbon age," a future historian may write, "busied themselves with extracting oil from under the land and the seabed. Much of the oil they burned to heat their homes, fuel their vehicles and power their factories. But some of it they used to make plastic, a substance they valued for its durability.

"Perversely, men employed this almost indestructible petroleum product for quite ephemeral purposes. They obsessively wrapped it around everything they ate and drank. The result was that each human meal generated a substantial quantity of waste in the form of soiled plastic containers. Some they burned. Some they buried in huge holes. But a considerable quantity of this plastic ended up in the sea.

"Because plastic tends to float, the rubbish came to cover ever wider areas of the ocean's surface. Currents and tides deposited a proportion on beaches all over the world, but much of it remained out of sight in 'Garbage Patches.' As the principal victims of plastic pollution were birds, fish and sea mammals, men paid little attention. Only a few recalled Edgar Allan Poe's lines:

The waves have now a redder glow —

The hours are breathing faint and low —

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.
"

So enjoy the seaside. But beware the coming tsunami of trash.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


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Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004). Comment by clicking here.


07/18/06: Forget the '60s and ‘Make Love, Not War.’ Today's world is facing a Summer of Rage
07/11/06: When will China pull the plug on North Korea?
06/20/06: Hedge funds vs. central bankers: Will inflation, deflation or recession win in the coming months?
06/13/06: Britain's economy is just like America's — minus the entrepreneurs and growth
06/06/06: The X-Men have taken over Washington
05/30/06: Quit protesting, profs!
05/23/06: World markets' wild ride: Economic volatility is back with a vengeance
05/16/06: The Cold Wars are coming
05/09/06: Many commentators are missing dangerous political shift
05/02/06: Put some sugar in your tank
04/25/06: Hu and the dog that didn't bark
04/18/06: Should Americans be less optimistic?
04/11/06: Globalization's second death?
04/04/06: So many ‘special’ friends
03/28/06: Let's get it right about what has gone wrong
03/21/06: Congress is trying to give the world a globotomy
03/14/06: Lame ducks can still bite back
03/07/06: A 19th Century critique of a 21st Century president
02/28/06: The crash of civilizations
02/21/06: Not the president, but close
02/14/06: Want historic trouble? Look south
02/07/06: Greenspan advising Britain? It's housing bubbles, deficits and potential meltdowns all over again
01/31/06: Missing the Cold War
01/24/06: It's a sick, Thick World
01/17/06: Tomorrow's world war today
01/03/06: Scotland, it's over, but keep the accents
12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq
12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq
11/22/05: Ghost of Napoleon haunts Tony Blair
11/22/05: Can it happen in Britain too?
11/15/05: Red plus blue equals purple
11/10/05: The fires of disintegration
11/01/05: Triumph of an über-wonk

© 2006, Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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