Sea of Plastics

word of month character

You may have heard me talk about environmental self defense.  As a part of my training this year, I have been challenged to not only reduce the amount of plastic that I personally use by 40 to 90%, but also to educate those around me about the effects of plastics on the rest of our environment.

One of the individuals who is doing research on this subject is Captain Charles Moore.  Capt. Moore is founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.  He discovered what is now called the Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean and is currently studying the effect of plastic pollution on our planets oceans.  The Garbage Patch is a very large area of the Pacific Ocean that due to the way the seas and wind move has trapped a great deal of the the garbage from many countries, including the United States, in an area in the ocean.  

Captain Moore was introduced to the world in a very public way at TED Talks, one of my favorite websites.  Soon the world knew of his work and discovery.  Part of Captain Moore’s team is Joel Paschal who is also acting as a consultant to the Ultimate Black Belt Test in our efforts to teach self defense from a “global” perspective.

More to the point though let’s do three things this year.

  1. Absorb the research and understand how plastic use and the oceans are connected to self-defense.
  2. Make a personal pledge to reduce the amount of plastics we use.
  3. Represent this material in our community –embrace at least one “environmental self-defense” project as a part of your belt test or just your commitment to protecting our earth.

Here are two links that will help
To learn about the material, go to this VPS.TV report on CNN
You can see Captain Moore on www.TED.COM talking about his work.