There’s a great song by Soul Asylum called Runaway Train, but it wasn’t about this! Yes, you read it right. In a surprise bid for freedom, a Docklands Light Rail train escaped its operator at West India Quay station and went for a ride. Naturally, being the DLR and English, it dutifully came to a peaceful ending at Westferry where the train awaited the return of the operator. For the uninitiated, the DLR operates in London.
In news that is far less funny, I wish to bring your attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. While humorously named, it’s decidedly less funny. You can read a story over at the San Francisco Chronicle about it. To sum it up, this collection of plastic is formed on land where a piece of plastic floats into a sewer, follows the storm drain to the ocean, then makes its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas. The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons — floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
People just don’t realize our planet can be broken, and it’s on the verge right now. Yes, we’re destroying our own planet, the only place we have to live. If it’s not global warming, it’s pollution. Talk about people shitting in their own backyard. Sad.