The Great Wave off the Garbage Patch

June 13, 2008 at 06:36
filed under art+design+technology, skate+snow+surf
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Here’s a well executed mash-up of a very famous piece of art, done with the great intention of raising awareness about how we treat our oceans. Done by the European chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, it utilizes the ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘ to illustrate how bad the situation has become.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is probably the most obvious example: plastic debris accumulating in the North Pacific Gyre has reached, depending on varying estimates, the size of Texas to twice the size of the continental United States. It is beleived that 80% of the debris found in the Patch originated on land, which means it could have been prevented. According to Greenpeace, 100 million tons of plastic are produced each year of which about 10% end up in the sea.

If you go to the Greenpeace site, there is an animation illustrating how this phenomenon happens. We need to be more careful with each of our individual actions if we wish to return our seas to the majestic states they once were, as they were originally depicted by Hokusai, the Japanese artist responsible for the original woodblock print.

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