
Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic' - VBprogrammer
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46275742
======
johnydepp
Over the past few months I have been trying to figure out a solution for
environmental issues in developing countries (like India where I'm from).
Conclusion is, because of the democracy, the change is not possible from
inside, some external force has to be there.

Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please
the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of
environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic
management.

Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late).
Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their
governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is
setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission.
If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.

Countries like US, Canada, Germany can take initiatives in doing so. Its not
only about their carbon-emission & plastic-management, its about the whole
planet.

Developing countries should be pressurized(!!) for reducing their population
as well. In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control
population (which is the root of all the problems here). With some external
pressure this could also be done I guess.

And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't
waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!

~~~
agumonkey
Educating takes a fair amount of mystic to make people believe in you. That's
the hardest part.

~~~
craftyguy
And, who determines what the curriculum is? For example, for a while it was
practically (or technically?) illegal to teach evolution in some schools in
the southern US. Just 'educating people' is not the full answer, and it could
actually be more harmful in the end to educate people with wrong information
than to not educate them at all.

~~~
agumonkey
no need for cosmological concepts to raise the education level

------
erikig
Just for comparison 6kg of plastic in a 60 ton animal is the same as 6g of
plastic in a 60kg organism (or a little above one teaspoon of plastic ingested
by a teenager).

~~~
alehul
While I understand the comparison you're trying to make, I'm not sure weight
is the best estimation here. A whale can be _heavier_ without being _larger_.
While the whale may weigh 1000x more, it appears to be only around 10x as big
(sperm whales are 40 feet long, and somewhat wider than humans).

If you take a look at the picture in the article, and analyze what it had
ingested: "115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two
flip-flops," it seems much less trivial than a teenager ingesting a teaspoon.

A better comparison would be that, size-wise, it is the same as a teenager
ingesting 2.5 plastic bags, 15 drinking cups; that alone seems like enough to
cause serious health issues.

~~~
nurumaik
Shouldn't we compare by volume, not length?

~~~
sdenton4
Worth noting that a greater proportion of a whales body is fat, to deal with
the cold cold waters... The size of the digestive system probably isn't quite
what one would expect from scaling purely by a volume ratio.

------
mrtrombone
I recently came back from Padang, Sumatra, was really impacted by the level of
pollution and did quite a bit of research.

\- It is too simplistic to just say it's all about education. Yes it needs
work however there is just not the infrastructure to manage the level of
rubbish. Jakarta has a giant landfill that receives 9000 tonnes of rubbish a
day. It had a landslide in 2005 that killed 143 people [1]. Indonesia are
working with Sweden around waste to energy technologies but it seems locked up
with other environmental concerns. This would be a great area for R&D spend -
making efficient / environmentally sound waste to energy systems that are cost
effective (and robust enough) for this part of the world [2].

\- So much of the rubbish I saw was from single serve items, particularly
snacks and toiletries. Reducing plastic bags would help but I think it's not
focussed on the primary issue. I think pressure on companies like Procter &
Gamble, Nestle, Unilever etc to move towards biodegradable single serve
packaging would go a long way - perhaps pragmatically this is a much better
place for governments to provide subsidies??

\- As can be seen with the Sulawesi earthquake other countries cannot just
show up and expect Indonesia to welcome them with open arms. It has to very
much be a partnership not a 'we know best' colonial spirit - Perhaps an
effective thing for universities to do is increase scholarships in these key
areas for Indonesian students.

[1] [https://geoenvironmental-
disasters.springeropen.com/articles...](https://geoenvironmental-
disasters.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40677-014-0010-5)

[2] [https://www.infrastructureasiaonline.com/strategic-
partnersh...](https://www.infrastructureasiaonline.com/strategic-
partnership/indonesia-cooperation-sweden-developing-renewable-energy)

------
carapace
A lot of doom and gloom here. I feel ya but I want to point out we have the
necessary solutions to save ourselves if we just notice and apply them. For
example, olivine just might "cure" atmospheric CO2. [1]

The primary things to look to are: Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution";
applied ecology (aka Permaculture); and Neurolinguistic Programming to help us
get over our BS.

[1]
[https://climitigation.org/category/olivine/](https://climitigation.org/category/olivine/)

~~~
hannasanarion
You know that neurolinguistic programming is pseudoscientific new age magic
bullshit, right?

Normally I give people the benefit of the doubt and presume they meant natural
language processing and expanded the acronym wrong, but I can't see how that
could apply here.

~~~
carapace
Yes, I meant the other NLP.

> You know that neurolinguistic programming is pseudoscientific new age magic
> bullshit, right?

I know no such thing. I'll grant you that _most_ of the people talking about
it, and _many_ of the practitioners, _are_ saying "pseudoscientific new age
magic bullshit", and that's extraordinarily unfortunate.

Nevertheless, the foundations and principles of NLP are sound and the
_reproducible results_ should not be ignored. NLP develops algorithms for
change that work. Is it a scientific body of knowledge? No. But it should be.
We should do science to it.

I'll point out that it originates with an application of Chomsky's
Transformational Grammar to transcripts of therapy sessions with very
effective therapists (Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erikson. I think
I spelled the names right.)

It's not pseudoscience because it doesn't claim to be scientific. Despite it's
unscientific nature it does provide reliable, repeatable algorithms for
overcoming our worser natures. We can use the techniques without buying into
any "new age magic bullshit" whatsoever. The whole point is that you don't
have to believe in any particular thing to have the techniques work. It's like
aspirin. You don't have to believe in aspirin to relieve your headache with
it. Aspirin doesn't care. NLP is the same way. In fact, you can alter your
belief structures using NLP, so logically it's ontological status must be
"meta-belief", but that's getting way far afield.

My main point stands: _NLP works._ (So who cares if it's wrapped in astrology
or the "Enneagram", or wearing rubber pants? We can clean it up later when the
fire has been put out, eh?)

~~~
hannasanarion
Science has been applied to it many times. It "works" insomuch as people feel
better after they're told that they're getting treatment. It has never shown
to be more effective than a sugar pill. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

The most favorable paper to neurolinguistic programming in the entire
literature amounts to "some people say it makes them feel better, therefore
evidence doesn't matter"[9]

So yeah, sure, it "works" in exactly the same way as kisses from mom on your
boo-boos "works". It might make you stop crying for a while, but that is not
how a rational person measures effective treatment.

1\.
[http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-21020-001](http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-21020-001)

2\.
[http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-0167.34...](http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-0167.34.1.103)

3\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070615185758/http://www.mheap....](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615185758/http://www.mheap.com/nlp1.pdf)

4\.
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920010...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920010212)

5\.
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb01975.x)

6\.
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920080...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920080403)

7\.
[https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/ppb/41/2/article-p...](https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/ppb/41/2/article-p58.xml)

8\.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120905075141/http://jarhe.resea...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120905075141/http://jarhe.research.glam.ac.uk/media/files/documents/2009-07-17/JARHE_V1.2_Jul09_Web_pp57-63.pdf)

9\.
[https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1746564101104...](https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/17465641011042035)

~~~
carapace
I don't know what to tell you, other than those "scientists" must have been
doing it wrong.

I mean it. What you have presented above is pseudoscience.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

> The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis)
> is an ongoing (2018) methodological crisis in the social and soft sciences
> in which scholars have found that the results of many scientific studies are
> difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce on subsequent
> investigation, either by independent researchers or by the original
> researchers themselves.

These are not _physicists_. Their inability to measure some effect of NLP
techniques argues for their incompetence, not the non-existence of the
effects. NLP isn't hard. I don't consider myself a practitioner, but I have
some experience applying NLP to get definite results. The techniques work.
"Submodality" manipulation alone should garner a Nobel prize.

Let me ask you, do you have any direct, personal experience with NLP? In other
words, what's your motivation here? You're not going to convince me it's bunk,
because I overcame crippling depression using it, and because I understand the
principles and they make sense. (Most of them, there are NLP-derived
techniques that work but no one know why. The so-called "VK Squash" for
example. Profound effects without a trace of theory as to why.) Am I going to
convince you? Maybe we should talk about NVC instead?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication)

~~~
hannasanarion
My dude. Please go get yourself some education on how science works. I feel
embarrassed for you.

The reproducibility crisis is about the prevalence of _false positive_ results
in the scientific literature. This video is a good primer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q)

A false positive is when a paper says "this works" when it actually doesn't,
because of a statistical fluke in their sample.

Even if citing the reproducibility crisis as an excuse to believe something
that science has repeatedly found to be false isn't a really bad reason for
belief (which it definitely is)...

it doesn't even apply because there can't be false positive results regarding
neurolinguistic programming because there aren't _any_ positive results
regarding neurolinguistic programming. Even the paper put out by
neurolinguistic programming practicioners themselves wasn't able to produce a
detectable effect over a placebo.

I'm sorry, my friend, but this is an intervention. You're in a cult. You're
making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and fortune
tellers.

~~~
carapace
i notice that you didn't answer my question. Do you have any actual experience
with NLP at all?

In any event, it really seems to me like you're more interested in insulting
me than in learning about NLP, so I don't think there's any reason to continue
talking about it, eh?

> You're making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and
> fortune tellers.

I understand that there's a superficial resemblance and I hate that, but as I
said, I don't know what to tell you.

NLP is really easy, so if those "scientists" weren't able to measure something
it's got to be "user error". I mean, I've personally done lots of experiments
that show obvious results, so... I could go on but what's the point, eh?
You've got your reality and I've got mine.

------
IshKebab
> pieces of string (3.26kg)

Over half of it was string? Is this from fishing or something?

~~~
alumowa
The original wording is "tali rafia", which is a flat plastic string used for
tying down/lashing many common everyday items. So no, not related to fishing.

------
pasta
Just today the Ocean Cleanup Project posted the first results on YouTube:
[https://youtu.be/RcRIE98y_UM](https://youtu.be/RcRIE98y_UM)

------
eezurr
This is something I have been thinking about (and mindfully being unattached
to either side). We know what it's like for society to go through an economic
depression and how poverty effects developing countries, and I think it's
pretty clear if we start wiping out the economy (which is the core of the
problem besides over population) the save the planet, we will create one.

How many jobs exist/created from engineering, manufacturing, selling,
marketing, transporting, and managing crap that we don't need? What would the
world look like if we wiped out all of those jobs? How will developing
countries be affected when their income from manufacturing these products is
drastically reduced?

What do we have that replaces plastic for transporting and storing goods/food?
Sand (silica?) is expected to become low in supply (e.g. for glass). How many
trees would we have to cut down to replace plastic?

Part of me is wondering if the route we are currently taking is the best one,
because change will happen gradually, giving us time to adapt. A sudden kick
to the balls of our the global economy, on the other hand, would have an
immediate, devastating impact; especially on developing countries.

------
patagonia
Callum Roberts wrote “The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea” in 2013.

Everyone should read it. This article is discussing issues that are not at all
new. That we treat it as new information is a symptom of the problem.

------
Frye
Are there any clean up projects going on at the major gyres shown in the
article? Seems like that would be a good place to start.

~~~
tim333
Yeah [https://www.theoceancleanup.com/](https://www.theoceancleanup.com/)

Though the majority of the plastic comes from people in Indonesia and China
chucking it in the river. Those countries really need to stop that with old
fashioned things like littering fines and sticking it in landfills. Plus
recycling etc naturally.

------
IshKebab
> Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic
> bags and two flip-flops.

How many straws though?

------
ericdykstra
93% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from 10 rivers.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-
plas...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-
tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)

Yangtze - East China Sea (Asia)

Indus - Arabian Sea (Asia)

Yellow River - Yellow Sea (Asia)

Hai He - Yellow Sea (Asia)

Nile - Mediterranean (Africa)

Ganges - Bay of Bengal (Asia)

Pearl River - South China Sea (Asia)

Amur - Sea of Okhotsk (Asia)

Niger - Gulf of Guinea (Africa)

Mekong - South China Sea (Asia)

~~~
gedy
This elicits an emotional response from my acquaintances, but this gets to the
main objection I have about feel-good measures like banning plastic straws. I
understand the "everything helps" argument, but not when people and the media
pour their energy and emotions into statistically meaningless measures then
move on. I've been hearing the same concerns my entire life, yet things keep
getting worse in statistically meaningful ways.

~~~
sdenton4
It's almost like all of the responsibility is out on individuals, while large
industrial interests are exempt from consideration. Strange how that
happened...

------
maplebush
Is it weird that this headline makes me think of Jon Bon Jovi?

------
smileysteve
Reasons to switch from oil based plastic to hemp oil based plastics.

~~~
ainiriand
> [https://www.eppm.com/blogs/editors-blog/speaking-up-for-
> plas...](https://www.eppm.com/blogs/editors-blog/speaking-up-for-plastics-
> in-a-plastic-bashing-world/)

------
ryanmercer
We need to get our heads out of our asses. I don't want to be that guy but...
we either need to radically change the way we live or 90% of us just need to
immediately cease to exist although I'm sure the remaining 750 million people
would still find ways to sabotage our planet. 'SHTF' fiction and science
fiction often turns to a pandemic wiping out large chunks of the population...
that would be bad for you, for me, for most people but we aren't the only life
on earth. We need to realize this, NOW. We need to grow up and start being
responsible for ourselves as individuals and as a species. As far as we know
we have exactly one habitable world in all of the universe and certainly only
one habitable world within our current technological means. Come on people!

We're ruining this planet multiple ways for not only ourselves but nearly all
other species. Nearly 40 gigatonsof carbon this year, microplastics are now in
the water and air the world around and has even been found in human feces on
multiple continents, at least one factory in China is using CFCs again, we're
doing all sorts of environmental damage strip mining resources for our throw-
away phones and MacBooks, we are depleting groundwater the world around at
alarming rates, we're losing our social abilities by staring at screens, we
are using an alarming amount of electricity just to speculate on
cryptocurrency, we drive 100-200 species extinct on average DAILY, we wage
wars over religion and oil and where an imaginary line should divide a group
of people, we murder each other for sneakers and pocket change or because
someone beat us in a video game, we die in internet cafes throwing our lives
away on virtual characters trying to get the latest super epic bind on pickup
gear while people starve to death, suicide rates rise as people feel
overwhelmed and trapped and that there is no hope and that they'll have to
work until they die, we chase billion dollar exits on our iPad fruit of the
month SAAS app as we walk by homeless people outside of our offices, we ship
produce halfway around the world to eat out of season and throw away enough
spoiled food to feed every hungry mouth on the planet... we are a scourge on
the earth, but we needn't be. We can sacrifice, we can make immediate changes
to the way we go about things to slow the damage we are doing, to buy
ourselves some time to not only stop but reverse it.

Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't
care.

Maybe we will get lucky and some advanced species will fill our skies with
their ships and temporarily take control of the situation. More likely, we'll
destroy ourselves like probably countless other intelligent species that the
universe has seen come and go.

It's depressing.

~~~
asdkhadsj
I say all of this as a thought experiment. But:

> Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't
> care.

I mean, if we're making mental jumps to wiping out billions of people - I'd
argue that, does it even matter? Ie, in your example human life largely
doesn't matter. Human survival maybe, but clearly not billions of lives. I'm
not saying this negatively either, just acknowledging what topic we're
discussing.

So if we're throwing away cultural norms on what we consider valuable, such as
human life, why even care about nature? Our species? Other species? The
planet?

It's an honest question. I imagine you could argue that human life is still
the most important thing, but we simply can't exist with 7 billion people.
Perhaps 6 Billion people need to die.

Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I
decide 6 billion people die. 6 billion to save 1 billion? That's a tough pill
to swallow. It's not like killing 1 person to save a million. Mentally I think
I struggle at that thought so much that I'd almost rather choose inaction,
passively killing 7 billion people, so I can't feel responsible for the
decision to kill 6 billion people.

Interesting thought analysis nonetheless.

~~~
titzer
> Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I
> decide 6 billion people die.

6 billion people _will_ die. Heck, _7.5_ billion will die. Everyone dies. The
question is not when, but how, and how do they live their lives.

I think we should pursue a solution not of genocide, but one of mass
sterilization. We should choose about 100 million people from all over the
Earth that will represent the genome of the next generation of humanity and
sterilize everyone else. And contrary to the closet racists' wet dream, this
should be done in exactly the opposite way: we should strive to _maximize_
genetic diversity and make sure that _everyone_ has a pretty close relative
represented. It would have to be massively automated, driven by genetic data,
and highly, highly scientific.

That's the only non-morally-horrendous depopulation solution that I can think
of. It would solve our population problem in ~60-70 years, naturally. Humanely
I would say.

To some, it might be liberating even. The need to not _ever_ worry about
supporting children, or really, about the future at all. They don't have to
live with a lower standard of living (by much). They don't have to figure out
how to compete with 8, 9, 10 billion other people trying to claw their way up
to the western standard of living. The childless could focus on bringing
meaning to their lives in other ways, can invest in the next generation in
other ways, and can transcend their biological destiny, which seems to be a
cruel joke programmed into us from the very first bacterium.

It'd be like creating a living ark within humanity.

And the resources left over, designed to support 8 billion, need only support
100 million. There'd be a plethora of energy and real estate. A lot of the
Earth could be turned back to wilderness. And humanity would take a smaller
role. By choice. Instead of it being forced on us by the system collapsing on
our heads.

~~~
IC4RUS
You don't think that a forced, mass sterilization is morally horrendous?

~~~
titzer
I am not a humanist. World population has doubled in my lifetime, and when you
weigh the tremendous pain and destruction that has caused and will cause, 3
billion extra lives that will witness (or their very close descendants) an
unprecedented mass extinction/collapse event due their own sheer weight, I'm
not sure that rampant uncontrolled population growth is not the thing that is
morally horrendous. Just look what humans have done to this planet in 30
years. Insect populations down 75%, mammals down 60%, the Great Barrier reef
is _half dead_ , extinction rates are 1000x normal, habitat loss, trash in the
oceans, global warming, climate change, microplastics, mass pesticide use,
fuck....it's hard not to view humanity (at least in relation to literally _all
other life on Earth_ ) through a very, very dark lens.

Yeah, given all this I don't think it's morally horrendous that most people
would not be allowed to have kids. They can do literally anything they want
with the rest of their lives, but FFS don't have kids.

~~~
IC4RUS
So you see humans through this dark lens, but advocate for these same humans
to decide who gets sterilized, then carry it out forcefully?

I don't see how this happens at all. Dystopian military force? And if someone
tried, it'd be a major conflict.

